


a good protection detail is hard to find

by jyorraku



Category: The Expanse (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, F/M, Minor Character Death, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-30
Updated: 2018-09-23
Packaged: 2018-11-06 16:47:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 19
Words: 33,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11040222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jyorraku/pseuds/jyorraku
Summary: In the aftermath of theGuanshiyin, all is not well, but the trio forges ahead with half-truths, confessions, and general snarkiness. There are valiant attempts to keep it business, but it's possible that Avasarala just didn't see this coming.





	1. Chapter 1

It was making Bobbie a little off kilter, being on the Tachi, or rather the Rocinante, after escaping Mao and his goons. Holden’s crew ran the Tachi through a good scrubbing, but stepping through the airlock, it was like coming home and knowing where all the cracks in the walls used to be, where the christened name of the ship would be etched so deep into its system that it could not be erased without scuttling the ship itself.

Bobbie found herself running her fingers over the aggressively grey panels, and at one particular moment exhaling more slowly as if she could recapture all that was Martian through the circulated air in her lungs. But all that was familiar faded away as she came to stand in front of Avasarala’s quarters, her shoulders braced before crossing that Martian Earth line once more.

“Bobbie.”

Bobbie blinked, and realized belatedly Avarsarala had been speaking to her. Her ears burned. “I’m sorry, ma'am. What did you say?”

Avasarala regarded her silently, her dark gaze piercing. Bobbie clenched harder at the fist she held behind her back and willed herself not to squirm. Just as Bobbie was getting lightheaded from holding her breath, Avasarala released her from the heady thrall of her undivided attention. Bobbie inhaled expeditiously, not particularly caring if the air was Martian or Earth, whilst wondering what it was about this woman that made her both laughably endearing and blood-chillingly frightening. Bobbie felt ensnared, bound and captivated, and most disturbingly, without a thought to escape.

“It’s nothing,” Avasarala said lightly, dismissing her previous words. But her eyes remained shuttered and the tightness around her mouth wavered, barely withholding that singular thought.

Bobbie felt a pressure build in her chest, her limbs tingling to move under the slightest provocation. “What’s wrong?” Bobbie asked, begrudgingly muttering words of semi-obligatory concern, not looking for an order or a call to action, nothing like that.

Avasarala readily leaned forward to speak. Then she demurred, pursing her lips in a forlorn sigh. Bobbie didn’t ask again, but her half perplexed and half eager problem-smashing demeanor seemed to move Avasarala to speak.

“Before you came to rescue us, Cotyar was contemplating a bargain with Captain Malik.”

Bobbie repeated the words deliberately, dangerous as they were, “A bargain?”

“The two of you, for me,” Avasarala finished, with an odd glint in her eyes.

“What,” Bobbie bit out, not so much a question as a truncated expletive. She swiveled about, making sure that the man in question wasn’t already in the room. He wasn’t. Her breath hitched and the pressure in her chest broke into a bloom of adrenaline.

“You’re the boss, he shouldn’t keep you waiting. I’m going to go get him,” she growled the last two words before stomping out.

Later, Bobbie would remember Avasarala didn’t try to stop her.


	2. Chapter 2

“Hey Cotyar,” Bobbie called out innocuously. As he turned, the moment he stood square across from her, she hauled back and punched him in the face.

Cotyar whipped sideways, but not quickly enough to completely avoid the power behind the arm that wrestled mech suits for shits and giggles. Her fist made contact, and he staggered back in retreat, cradling his jaw, fingers flexing like he was counting teeth.

“The next time you want to sell out, leave me out of it!” Bobbie growled, her arms strained with a raw anger that shook her frame. But she stayed back, surprising herself for wanting to hear what he had to say for himself.

Which was nothing. Cotyar stared out at some vague point at the carpet in front of him, declining to say a word. Her lips thinned with a stab of disappointment. “And you asked me about betraying my oath,” she sneered with contemptuous huff.

He shifted his flat gaze back to her and smiled sardonically. “No ‘thank you’ for trying to save your Martian ass?”

“I would have rather died with her,” she spat with such instinctual conviction that she blinked and fell back a half a step, startled at her own vehemence.

Cotyar shook his head at her with pitying tisk. "Exactly how long have you been with us? I told you to let her win, not to swear you can't live without her."

An uncomfortable heat bloomed in her cheeks. Bobbie ignored it. “Fuck you, are you saying she shouldn’t be angry after you tried to sell her out?”

He rolled his eyes. "I was stalling for time. Didn't even know if you were coming back for us.”

Her hackles rose instantly. "I would have never left—"

"And how would I have known that?" he asked softly.

She nearly laughed, and stood ramrod straight, chest puffed. "If you didn't trust me, you wouldn't have brought my armor," she singsonged smugly.

"I suppose," Cotyar sighed, scratching his sore jaw, before gazing at her with a wry twist of his lips, "Too bad the feeling isn't mutual."

Bobbie's eyes went saucer-shaped. She opened her mouth but couldn't find the words. It was becoming a habit with him, bastard spy tricking her into speechlessness.

“She believed you were giving her up,” she finally said, scowling.

All the arid humor drained from Cotyar's face, turning it into icy granite. He sauntered into her personal space, but with a razor edge of temper that had Bobbie coming to stand at parade rest, chin raised. Up close, she could see his nostrils flaring, his eyes glaring at her but not seeing.

"She's still mad about that, is she? She shouldn't have been there in the first place. With or without us, she could have died. So yes, I may have led her to believe I was giving her up, because I was pissed," he snapped, anger rolling off him in blistering waves.

Bobbie blinked at this, shifting her feet. “Hey…”

“You have no idea how hard I tried to talk her out of meeting Mao. Did you think I wanted to lose another Avasarala on my watch?!” Fury or fear, Cotyar was trembling with it, the whites of his eyes bloodshot with remembered scenes of death and debt.

Bobbie shook her head carefully, placating hands stretched out awkwardly in the tiny space between them. “No, nobody thought that,” she tried, the gentle words like marbles in her mouth.

He immediately shot her a snarl of derision.

“Oh. So I did. I. She.”

Martian marines did not sputter. God, she thought, these Earthers and their fucking pathos. What the hell, was this what the enemy had been like all these years? Assholes on the outside and barely holding their shit together on the inside.

“Look Cotyar..." She paused. What was she, their therapist?! Why was she even here?! 

It hit her, the clouds parting. Chrisjen fucking Avasarala, that was why.

Bobbie bristled and clapped a friendly, but all too heavy hand on Cotyar's shoulder. To his credit, he didn't waver, not so much as a flinch. Something strange twisted beneath her chest, and she willed herself not to like it. She drew a smirk on her face instead.

"Does she know how you feel about her?”

Her words came out just a tad too saccharine. Her tone, too mocking. A touch of schadenfreude for the man who deemed himself too smart for a marine, but not smart enough to stay the hell away from that stubborn, conniving, bulldozer of a woman.

Cotyar smiled with feral teeth and provided an equally sweet rejoinder, “You can fuck off along with her.”

He set himself back down on the bunk, arms raised, cushioning his head like he didn't have a care in the world. His shirt lifted slightly, the medical gauze visible on his left side. The sterile white stood in stark contrast with the small black hairs visible above the low hanging waistline of his pants.

Bobbie stared, frowning.

Feeling her gaze on him, Cotyar rolled, his back to her.

Should she feel offended or pleased? Was he turning his back on her because he had enough of her or was he leaving his back open, one of the most vulnerable of all defense positions because he trusted her?

"That means get out, Draper."

Her eyes had meandered down his back and found cause to stop above his muscled thighs. Did he say something? 

Finally, as if he felt her oddly placed gaze burning a hole in him, Cotyar rose with a snap, "What?!" He winced regretfully at the sudden motion and placed a hand over his wound.

Bobbie clenched her fists, but otherwise remained motionless. "Aren’t you spy types supposed to be all fake smiles and dead behind the eyes?”

Cotyar stopped short, before grinning blithely over the pain. “I don’t know what kind of spies you have on Mars, but clearly they need to work on their infiltration skills if you can spot them by their artificial smiles and zombie eyes."

Bobbie straightened and looked down her nose at him. "They are more than adequate, thank you. You on the other hand," she stopped, staring pointedly at his injury, "just barely."

He shrugged. “We're all alive, aren't we? I never try to disabuse people of my inadequacy. That way they’re always pleasantly surprised. ”

"You're a sneaky bastard, that's what you are," she said, giving him a rude once-over.

Cotyar smiled shamelessly, "Well…yes." He leaned back on his palms, as if encouraging her to peruse further.

His shirt raised again, and the words are out of her mouth before passing through her brain. "I wouldn’t mind being pleasantly surprised.”

Cotyar blinked twice and tilted his head, in the universal manner of polite confusion. It was an out and if she was a fucking normal person, she would have taken it.

"Unless you have something better to do?" Bobbie forged defiantly ahead, deftly raising a dark eyebrow.

Cotyar opened his mouth to speak, but seemed to think better of it.

The silence dropped like a bomb between them. The heat of it spread in the air until she felt like the top of her head was steaming, along with other places. Her chest pounded with the force of taiko drums.

Cotyar kept his face impressively straight, until he closed his eyes, and whatever was behind them made his left cheek twitch. His eyelids snapped open and she glimpsed a dark heat behind the widened pupils before he ran a palm over his face. His thumb and middle finger pressed into his temples before he spoke.

"Draper," his voice a low rasp of exasperation, "get out."

She jumped and walked out, her limbs stiff with specific instructions to not flee like a silly girl who had just embarrassed herself by propositioning a guy who couldn't even walk straight yet.

Also, she had just punched him in the face.


	3. Chapter 3

"You could have given me some warning," Cotyar grumbled as he walked into Avasarala's quarters, holding his bruised cheek.

Avasarala's eyes were alight with amusement. "Would it have helped?" she asked, before quickly pursing her lips to keep the curves from stretching upward.

He thought about it. "No," he admitted with a grunt.

There was something truly disturbing about the company he was keeping these days. And as much as his ego and other parts liked it, tossing in Draper's proposition made the whole situation even more maddening. His jaw worked into a mulish tilt as he sat.

Avasarala rose from her seat, a simple and elegant swish that was a grand production in these cramped quarters. A lesser being would have gawked, Coytar was decidedly not going to be a lesser of anything today, refusing to turn as she came to stand at his side.

Cotyar heard a puff of breath that was somewhere between an exasperated huff and a resigned sigh. He was ready for a particularly stern and blisteringly foul-mouthed talking-to, so he started as Avasarala brusquely placed the soft pads of her fingers on the stubble beneath his jaw. She rotated his face as much as he would allow, this way and that, surveying whatever minor damage Draper may have caused. He inhaled loudly with a petulant hiss as her index finger brushed across the spot of black and blue.

Her low pitched chuckle wasn't heard as much as it was felt, so it was only after the light brush of her lips on his bruised skin that he registered the kiss.

"There, all better," Avasarala cooed, the warm amber tones of her voice reverberating through the short hairs of his bare neck.

Cotyar caught her fingers before her hand moved away and looked up at the older woman with an unctuously wide grin.

"You realize you've just given me an incentive to get punched more often."

Avasarala graced him with a spectacular roll of her charcoal eyes, but he caught the subtlest shade of pink across her cheeks and instinctively held on before she tugged her hand back.

They were smaller than he imagined, her fingers. Cotyar knew that many lives were controlled by each gesture and many souls would dance to the tunes orchestrated by them. But in this moment, in his callused grip, her fingers felt fragile. He suddenly remembered what he said to her, back on Earth, how it felt to work for the good guys again.

Cotyar brought her hand in, and placed between her fingers a kiss of his own.

Avasarala considered him with an unreadable look before sighing dramatically, "I was not in a good place when you decided to throw that hissy fit. Can you blame me for being just a little upset?"

He released her and wondered which deity he had angered for him to become beholden to such an infuriating creature. The answer was never forthcoming. He intoned, "Draper's right hook wasn’t very little." They both knew that punch was on her behalf.

She returned to her seat, sitting down prim and straight like a queen returning to her throne. "I meant it, when I said I was sorry."

Sorry for not giving a shit about his opinion? Sorry for getting on Mao's ship in the first place? Sorry for getting him shot?  Sorry for not believing in him?  Sorry that his debit to Charanpal could never be erased until she died of old age, which, considering her Machiavellian shenanigans, was going to be damn impossible to do?

Cotyar drummed his fingers on the armrest. He considered her sorry, his sorry and their general state of sorriness.

"Sorry's not going to cut it," he decided.

Avasarala smiled as he knew she would. Bargaining with favors was familiar territory. "What do you want then?"

"A vacation?" he tried. It was something he heard other people enjoyed.

She waved all around them. "What do you think we're doing here instead of blasting our way back to Earth?"

Coytar glanced around the tiny claustrophobic quarters and the relentlessly dull decor. He shrugged. "I'm pretty sure you're here getting your ducks in a row to hang Errinwright by his balls."

"Yes, he does have massive fucking balls. I look forward to cutting them off. Slowly."

Cotyar unobtrusively crossed his legs.

The lights suddenly changed shade. He stood, frowning.

Draper was in the door before Avasarala finished the invite. The haunted look in her eyes reminded Cotyar of her testimony at the peace summit.

"Holden's crew found a ship."

This was a shit vacation.


	4. Chapter 4

"We don't have a good record with SOSs. Last time we responded to a mayday," Alex paused, his miming fingers flashing open as he mouthed an understated boom.  
  
"Someone called us a shit magnet once," Amos offered. Holden threw him a sour look. Amos canted his head. A second later he amended, "Maybe twice."  
  
"Amos," Holden growled with the chagrin of a man who knew his complaint was destined to fall on deaf ears.  
  
The larger man deadpanned, "He said shit followed you around."  
  
The Rocinante crew went quiet, as if taking a moment of silence. Most likely for the man who was unable to escape the shit tornado that he himself identified. And sticking out among the solemn mourners was Prax, who, while quiet like the rest of them, seemed somewhat bewildered.  
  
It was Naomi who took pity on him and asked the question on everyone's minds. "Do you think Cortazar led Dawes here, another site with the protomolecule? And then something went wrong?"  
  
Avasarala glanced sideways at Bobbie. The Martian had gone several shades of pale upon hearing what might be lurking on the OPA ship that was calling out for rescue on the unsettled asteroid before them. Still, Bobbie held herself like the sergeant she no longer was, with her shoulders up and feet apart in an ever ready stance. And that actually made it worse. Avasarala irrationally wanted her to sit down, have some hot tea, and just take a god damn nap until this whole shit blew over. But now was hardly the time, nor would it be particularly constructive for Bobbie or the current situation...unless. She felt a smile stretch over her own face, and caught Cotyar's ever observing eyes. He straightened from a lackadaisical lean as she spoke.  
  
"We won't know until we get eyes in there. Bobbie can lead your team," Avasarala announced.  
  
Bobbie jerked to face her, though the younger woman's face was otherwise devoid of any resemblance of an emotion.

Holden goggled at Bobbie, then her. "What? With all due respect to your aide, ma'am, this isn't your average spacewalk."

"Uh, hey Chief..."

"Not now, Alex," Holden waved dismissively, though Alex was almost jittery to get a word in.  
  
"Draper's done this before," Cotyar supplied, scratching his neck before adding a vaguely foreboding turn, "and then some."

"And I'd hardly suggest so otherwise," Avasarala explained in her eminently reasonable you-are-a-dumb-piece-of-shit-if-you-don't-let-me-handle-this-one tone. She surveyed each of the others slowly, as if daring them to say otherwise. She stopped at Bobbie herself, and was inordinately gratified that a spot of color was making a reappearance.  
  
Impressive as it may be, Bobbie's physique failed to convince Holden of her leading his team on his injured behalf. He squinted at Bobbie. "Have you even been on a rock before?"  
  
Alex abruptly doubled over with laughter, "Trust me, hoss, the rock she's from, you don't wanna mess with."  
  
Bobbie gave Alex a flatly measured look.  
  
Alex held his hands up in mock surrender. "Hey, if you want to get in there, my team's gotta know who's watching their backs."  
  
Holden pivoted back and forth between Alex and Bobbie. It hit him with a frown.  
  
"Wait, you're from Mars too?" he asked. Bobbie raised an eyebrow at him, a silent 'yeah, want to make something of it?'  
  
"She's not just from Mars, Chief. Tell me if I'm wrong, but this lady right here is a bonafide Martian marine," Alex drawled.  
  
Avasarala wasn't the least bit amused when Holden reared back from her with disbelief, "But you're the UN undersecretary."  
  
"And you're flying around in a stolen OPA retrofitted MCRN corvette-class frigate that's suppose to hold thirty Martians instead of five contracted ice haulers. What's your point?" Cotyar asked coolly.  
  
Bobbie went a little wide-eyed at Cotyar surgical identification of the ship despite all the subterfuge. Avasarala suspected Bobbie was impressed despite herself, but it also seemed to have parted the clouds for something that was bothering her.  
  
"Well, he ain't wrong," Amos proclaimed.  
  
"I'm not an ice hauler," Prax pointed out.  
  
Everyone turned to stare at the botanist. Prax blinked at the sudden attention and withered ever so slightly.

The sudden slam of a Martian fist on a solid surface brought everyone up straight. Avasarala stepped back and shot Cotyar a warning. She did not have a good feeling about this.  
  
"They said the Donnie was picking you up when it was attacked," Bobbie finally spoke, her index finger identifying Holden as the 'you.' Her mouth was curving in a way that was more menace than mirth. "That's the only way you could have gotten a ship like this one. You stole the Tachi and left them with the enemy!"  
  
It happened in less than in a blink of an eye, and yet time seemed to slow as Bobbie leaped over the table on her way to strangle Holden, if Avasarala read the intent in her eyes correctly.  
  
"Whoa, wait a minute!" Holden staggered back. Having a seething mountain of a Martian marine bearing down on him was perhaps a singularly unnerving experience. His crew immediately circled the wagons around him, in a display of loyalty that was more instinctive than for show.  
  
"You left them to die!" Bobbie howled, as Cotyar, timely as ever, managed to restrain her.  
  
"No!" Holden exclaimed, to the point of being offended, "That's not--Lieutenant Lopez was under orders by Captain Yao to get us off the Donnager before she scuttled it. We were the only witnesses to the stealth ships attacking the Donnager as they did to the Canterbury. We barely made it out as it is!"  
  
Avasarala was about to speak up to defuse the situation when she noticed how Bobbie was twisting in Cotyar's grip. How odd when it was obvious she had the strength to try to throw him off. When Cotyar emitted a low hiss, Bobbie subsided and that was when it was made clear to her, that Bobbie was wholly pissed off yet somehow being mindful of his recovering wound.

Oh dear, how much did she want to keep Bobbie in her clutches and just never let go.

It was during this intermission that Holden's statement sank in for Bobbie. She frowned and queried, "Lopez?"  
  
Naomi looked around her, seeing the men maintaining a safe distance and a wary silence. She came forward, sympathy gentling her voice, "We couldn't have commandeered this ship in that short of a time. Lieutenant Lopez was the only one left in our escort and he was hurt, so he gave us the ship's controls and that was how we escaped the stealth ships. I'm sorry, but he and his team died completing their captain's orders."  
  
At this, Bobbie unclenched her fists.  
  
"Yeah, the man had dead eyes and a face a mother wouldn't kiss, but he and his team didn't fuck around," Amos added after Naomi.  
  
Alex made a face at Amos, "Hey, have some respect for the dead."  
  
"I just said he and his team didn't--"  
  
Avasarala slapped her hands on the main console, jolting all of them. "While I'm sure we all have lovely stories of how everything went to shit, we don't have the god damn time! If that asteroid turns into another Eros, who knows who's going to get fucked over next."  
  
"It's supposed to be uninhabited and I haven't gotten any heat spikes from it," Naomi reported softly, covering for the shock of the crew in the aftermath of the UN undersecretary's colorful exclamation.  
  
"So it's not going for a run, not yet," Holden muttered as he recovered and started to pace. "I don't like this, we should just nuke the whole thing. One less thing to worry about." He halted and stared at Naomi's profile with a grimace.  
  
"Even if there's nothing in there, maybe the data core can tell us where they went. If we can get Cortazar back, he might help us find Strickland and the kids he took from Ganymede," Naomi said, thinking one step ahead whilst avoiding Holden's gaze.  
  
Avasarala took note of this exchange. There was something this crew was not telling her, but it would have to wait.  
  
"That's a whole lotta of ifs, Naomi. We barely got rid of whatever the hell that was tearing through her..." Alex ran his fingers over the Roci's bulkhead, until he caught Amos narrowing his eyes at him, "...the ship. I mean. The Rocinante, our ship." Alex slouched a bit and carefully peered up at Bobbie to see if she had any further objections on its ownership. Bobbie pointedly ignored him, which he seemed to take as a good sign. This crew...one must wonder how they survived this long. She suspected the engineer had more hand in that than the captain.  
  
"But the key to finding Mei could be there," Prax insisted. He turned to the newcomers with guilt and distress in his voice, "Please, my daughter, she's only four. We trusted Dr. Strickland and he's a part of this. She must be so afraid." He held on each of their gazes, this time unwilling to back down.  
  
Avasarala smiled expectantly.  
  
"We're going in there," Bobbie stated, making direct eye contact with everyone in a way that brook no further argument. Avasarala observed this with calculated delight, and truth be told, a touch of personal pride.  
  
Holden capitulated with an uneasy sigh. "Fine. Airlock in ten."  
  
It was hardly a surprise to Avasarala when Bobbie, in her power armor with her helmet under her arm, made her way back around in five. Seeing her and Cotyar in the corridor just before the airlock, Bobbie slowed before coming to stand in front of her.  
  
Bobbie took a deep breath, before saying, expressionlessly, "Thank you, ma'am."  
  
"Don't," Avasarala said. She reached up and gently grasped Bobbie's stony face in her hands, "I may be sending you to your death."  
  
A flummoxed softness flickered in Bobbie's gaze before something bloody and hard returned, "Then I'll go down fighting, just like my team did."  
  
Avasarala was speechless against this deadly declaration, feeling like her lungs were being squeezed too tight. Bobbie mechanically removed her leadened hands and nodded an acknowledgement at Cotyar before resuming her final destination.

Before Avasarala could recover, Cotyar stuck out an arm and calmly grabbed Bobbie by the wrist of her armor. In that instant, Avasarala found her speech and in her most steely voice, declared darkly, "Roberta Draper, if you don't come back to us in one piece, I'll rescind your asylum and ship whatever is left of you back to Mars in perpetual disgrace."  
  
Bobbie stiffened and for a long second Avasarala wondered if she pushed too far, that is until she saw Bobbie sneaking a glance at Cotyar.  
  
Cotyar responded with a barely perceptible shake of his head. Sidling up next to Bobbie, he muttered, "Watch your six and don't forget to come back for us injured spies..." He trailed off with something that sounded suspiciously like 'old ladies.'  
  
Bobbie gave him a quick and serious nod.  
  
Cotyar squinted at this, as if displeased. Edging closer, he set a hand on Bobbie's shoulder, and spoke right into her ear, so close Bobbie could probably feel the heat of his breath.  
  
"She's got an important assignment coming up that she says only you can accomplish. So, get your ass back here and help us Draper, you're our only hope."  
  
Bobbie snorted, her shoulders shaking with a muffled chuckle. Cotyar didn't give her a chance to lose it, releasing her with a quick squeeze to her shoulder and a push toward the airlock. Avasarala felt her upper lip twitch.   
  
Just as Cotyar came to stand beside her, Bobbie looked back at them, tilting her chin back with a faint smile, and left.  
  
The moment after Bobbie was out of their sights, Avasarala gave Cotyar a sidelong glance and held it a beat longer than what was polite.  
  
"Well, I feel dirty," Cotyar groused, an excuse for the full body squirm that followed.  
  
"Really? Whatever for?" she asked with indulgent benevolence.  
  
His eyes shuttered and a look of nausea overcame him. "Playing the good cop."  
  
He was close enough to elbow so that was what Avasarala did.  
  
"Ow! Gunshot wound!"  
  
She was instantly contrite, "Shit, I forgot." Her hands fluttered over him before he warded her off with a comically quick sidestep.  
  
Cotyar glared at her. She had a feeling it was for both the continued aggravation to his injury--though this time was inadvertent--and for the cursing. Why he felt the selective need to chide her for it was a puzzle. She supposed he considered it unbecoming her as a highly regarded stateswoman, in which case she'd like him to take a flying leap off a fucking bridge. Or, if she was feeling generous, he just thought it wasn't something a grandmother would do, as Charanpal had once thought.  
  
Avasarala sighed. She saw beyond the corridor and swallowed dryly before asking, "Did I make a mistake sending her down there after what happened to her on Ganymede?"  
  
"No. And you didn't need me to tell you that," Cotyar answered, annoyingly.  
  
A flying leap was too good for him. Her eyes narrowed, shooting him some blunt daggers. "You are becoming much too cheeky for your own good."  
  
"I'm on vacation, I can be as cheeky as I want," he said, cheekily. "Com'on, let's go see what a Martian marine is made of."


	5. Chapter 5

The airlock was empty still.

Bobbie opened an interface to sync the audio and video feeds of her helmet to the Roci's channels. Its chirp of confirmation was nearly instantaneous, far faster than she was used to on the Scirocco or any other ships on her rotations. The Donnager was Jupiter fleet's flagship and it stood to reason that whatever wares it held were some of Mars' best. The wares and the people. Even if her time on the Donnie ended on a sour note, there was never a question that those were the people she wanted to have her back.

Lined up, the stories and everything she'd experienced thus far meant that a bunch of UN and Martian top brass were complicit in Mao's schemes. All the Martian, Earther, and Belter blood spilled on Phoebe, the Canterbury, the Donnager, Eros, and Ganymede were not enough to make them reconsider their unholy alliance. And those with boots on the ground and bodies in the vacuum were just going to keep dying.

No one's going to fucking die today.

Bobbie combed through the weapons lockers and lifted out an assault rifle. She popped the magazine out to check that it was fully loaded, then lifted the barrel up to her eye line. It would have to do, although if this was a MCRN frigate there was a possibility that it was carrying something with more punch. Footsteps sounded behind her, she instinctively swiveled. Amos stared blankly at the weapon aimed at him until Bobbie lowered it. He continued forward blithely, pulling into the airlock a dark gray crate. She had to wonder if he had guns pulled on him all the time.

"Your man Cotyar said to bring these to you if we had them," Amos said, dropping the crate at her feet. Prax came in a little after him with another crate.

Bobbie read the white markings on top. GM munitions. She blinked, the corner of her mouth pulling crookedly upward. The unremarkable containers were each to hold Goliath Mark III rated mini-missile magazines and high explosive rounds. She stopped short of ripping the tops off just to be sure.

The MCRN techs had removed all the ammunition from her armor before turning it over to the UN. She had told herself not to look a gift horse in the mouth when she donned the unarmed armor on the Guanshiyin. It was a fit that didn't sit quite right, a frankensteined suit brought back to life by choices that brought her to this point.

Bobbie managed to open the crates without resorting to anything that could be misconstrued as violence. Inside, the ammo gleamed back at her with a wink of light.

Fucking Coytar. First her armor and now this. He certainly knew the quickest way to a girl's heart. And if this was how he treated a defected Martian marine, it was no wonder why Avasarala kept him around, vanishable bodies be damned, as long as he kept bringing her these things, giving her these feelings.

Sweetly anticipating her need for high caliber firepower. Damn him.

Amos eyed the rifle she'd found, taken, and set down in favor of the new arrivals. "I know they pack a bigger kick, but they didn't load to the stuff we had on hand, so we had to toss them in storage," he offered with a rueful shrug.

They already stole a Martian gunship, was he lamenting the lack of power armors in their loot? Bobbie clamped down the urge to growl and suddenly felt a bizarre sense of camaraderie with Holden. She inhaled a deep calming breath. None of it mattered, all that mattered was that she was getting a second chance, and she was going to be armed to the teeth against the same thing that killed her team. Picking up a clip, she felt the shape and weight of the rounds heavy in her hand. She slotted the it into the empty chamber of her suit, the weight of each armor piercing bullet like another drop of the anchor.

Yet, it was hard not to notice the way Amos was staring, cataloging the procedure in a way that was less curious observation and more mental dissection.

"They're speced for your power armor," Amos confirmed, a pointless statement if not for the apparently non-zero chance he'd cannibalize the gatling gun if she went down.

"They certainly are," she murmured darkly with appreciation, her eyes already on the mini-missiles. If she was going down, she was going to make sure she used everything in her arsenal before it came to that.

"We'll leave you to them then," she heard Prax mumble as he herded Amos away from her immediate vicinity. Good man, didn't think he had that in him.

Naomi was the last to arrive, bearing what appeared to be a rocket launcher. She observed silently as the engineer explained how she managed to rig it to safely catapult a nuclear core to a relatively safe distance--something that was proven to distract the hybrid during their previous encounter. Prax perked up at this non-lethal solution and Amos even cracked a smile--though in his case it was probably his appreciation for Naomi's ingenuity. Dear lord, they were so...scrappy.

Bobbie looked over her team as they finished gearing up and stilled against a visceral ache in her ribs. Amos, Naomi, and Prax were ready to fall behind her, their faces pale behind the vac suits that were rated for ice excavation rather than battle. It wasn't that long ago that Sa'id, Hilly, and Travis were the ones in their place and look what happened to them.

Jesus Christ. They were no marines and their survivability was contingent on her keeping her shit together down there. Yes, she was armed and ready for a fight, but Lieutenant Sutton words of staying on mission, the very same ones that she sneered at, were coming back to haunt her. And besides, it'd have to be beaten out of her, but she did like helping Avasarala unravel all the fucked up protomolecule shit storm. Bobbie remembered Avasarala's hands, soft against her cheeks, her shadowed eyes filled with worry. If Avasarala wanted her back, no, needed her back for the next assignment, maybe she could save the fight for another day.

Bobbie turned to addressed her team and saw in their eyes that she was making the right decision. "All right, our primary objective is assist the survivors and gather intel, or get the data core if all hands were lost. If we encounter a hybrid down there, you are to disengage immediately and haul ass back to the ship." She inhaled a steady breath, "This thing took out six UN marines and three of the best Martian marines I've ever served with. We are not going down that road today."

The deck rumbled beneath their feet and they hear a mechanical hiss beyond the airlock. Holden's voice piped over the comms, "We've got contact. Be careful out there, and keep the comms open in case there's a stealth ship lurking."

"Copy," Bobbie replied, "I'll lead. Noami and Prax, stay on my six. Amos, bring up the rear."

They descend into the darkness of the OPA ship. It was silent, both on the ship and through the comms, but in the absence of sound was a tension held so tight that it was a physical bond, holding them together.

Bobbie was the first to spot the floating bodies that her visor read as cold and gone. The bulkheads were charred with weapons charges. Icy flakes of crimson drifted and spun listlessly as they moved through the corridor. 

They came across a figure clad in shimmery silver vac suit stuck to a mangled opening likely made by a breaching charge. Holden broke the silence. "I've seen those suits before, they were the ones that boarded the Donnager from the stealth ships."

"They came looking for Cortazar," Naomi concluded grimly.

They heard a small crash over the ship comms. "Miller was right. We should have killed all of them," Holden snapped.

So the Roci crew were scrappy and apparently more blood thirsty than she realized. Bobbie wasn't sure if that was a particularly good combination.

They came to the threshold of the bridge, the pressure door barring their way. Bobbie sent a small charge to the door's sensors through her armor and read the feedback. "Good seal. Oxygen down to 3%."

She didn't need to spell it out for these people. Three percent was as good as zero.

"Let's hope there's someone in there who got their suit on in time," Alex drawled, "Cause that's a bad way to go."

Bobbie gestured for Naomi and Prax to situate themselves against the hull and called Amos over to cover the other side of the door. With her back to the hull and the gun in her arm raised, she caught his eye and ordered, "On three, you go low, I'll go high."

Amos nodded an acknowledgement. Bobbie punched the release, and counted to three in a silence that was both promising and ominous. They swept in, her armor making her a broad and deliberate target as Amos slinked in.

Bullets didn't fly. Instead, they found a lone figure in a vac suit lying against a console and heard a woman's voice broadcasting wide.

"Fuck me, it's the Mickey patrol."

"Draper, behind her left arm." Cotyar's voice rang out for the first time with a warning.

"I see it," Bobbie bit out, holding up a fist to those behind her. She switched to broadcast, "You got something behind you, lady?"

"Ah, you Inners never like our Belter surprises." The woman pulled out a small brick with protruding wires, her hand deliberately pressed against a glowing red panel. "Surprise..."

"A dead man's switch, that's original," Amos commented on the same wide band, earning a quick swipe at the neck from Bobbie.

"Hey now, that's a dead woman's switch to you," the woman snarked before she coughed wetly with suppressed groan.

Someone swore colorfully on the ship's channel, and surprisingly enough it wasn't Avasarala. Instead, Bobbie could hear her deep rasp, "You said this was Anderson Dawes' ship?"

There was a reply to the affirmative.

"Bobbie, tell her Fred Johnson sent you," Avasarala commanded.

"Shouldn't it be Dawes?" Holden asked hurriedly, fear lacing through his voice.

That occurred to Bobbie as well, but she instinctively did as Avasarala ordered, "You really going to blow us up after Fred Johnson went to all this trouble? I don't think so."

The woman narrowed her increasingly glassy eyes at her, "When did Fred get a Martian on the payroll?"

Amos heaved a sigh and strolled over, down to a crouch next to the woman and her bomb before Bobbie could stop him.

"Lady, you saw us coming." Amos gestured with the barrel of his gun to the working screen above them, where Roci's signature blinked steadily, "We look like a Martian patrol to you? What, Fred Johnson can see the light and join the cause but a Martian can't? That's some prejudiced bullshit and doesn't speak well for the cause."

The woman listed sideways at this, and shot back with a grumble, "I didn't see her at the our last OPA party, 's all, pretty sure I'd remember." She reached down under the console and shoved a black box into Amo's arms before shooing him off. "The fuckers took the drive and whatever was left of Dawes' men. I cloned it before they boarded."

Bobbie kept her right arm trained on the woman as she started lazily tapping out what appeared to be a disable sequence on the bomb. Jaw-clenched with irritation, Bobbie's cheek twitched as the woman multi-tasked, chattering away while death hummed beneath her shaking hands, "Tell bosmang I tried but the ship came out of nowhere, barely got away playing chicken. Cortazar got a message out to them..."

The instant the light turned green, Bobbie came forward to separate irritating woman from deadly bomb, but instead, found herself there just in time for the Belter woman to collapse into her arms. Up close, Bobbie's eyes adjusted to the light of the woman's helmet and recognized the gray hue of the woman's skin. Death wasn't in the cards for her and her team, but it wasn't done yet.

The Belter pulled her down until their helmets touched, and Bobbie could hear her gasping her final words, "Tell Fred to keep my name out of that god damn drawer of his. He don't owe me none, I only die for people who deserve my loyalty."

The woman released her and fell back, her eyes fluttering close, dark lashes resting with finality above a hardworn smile. Her suit chirped a warning as she flat-lined.

"Clear!" Bobbie announced loudly, "Prax, get in here!"

Prax slid in next to her as Naomi re-pressurized the room. They worked on removing the woman's vac suit only to find it already filled with blood that originated from her stomach wound. Prax checked the woman's pulse and eyes as Naomi came over to place her hands over the bleeding. Finding no additional wounds as she flung the vac suit away, Bobbie stared blankly as blood congealed darkly against the metallic sheen of her armor. Prax glanced up and shook his head, "She's gone."

Amos called out from the main navigation console. "She was right, they took the drive. But if she cloned it, we should find out where Cortazar sent his last message."

Bobbie stood, the dead woman laying at her feet, her last words echoing in her head.

"Let's get the fuck out of here."


	6. Chapter 6

Cotyar found Bobbie standing sentinel over the black body bag that held the Belter woman. He rounded to the other side of the table. The solitary silence shed its stiffness, stretching and finding softness in the arc between their two points. Its curvature held and gathered until the silent empty became a quiet full.

He peered into the transparent plastic window of the body bag and saw a lively smile on the dead woman's face. Mourning was for someone who didn't believe she did what she wanted with her life. She died with her cover unbroken and goods delivered. Not an ideal ending, but it was a fine one for a spy who knew the score. He nodded a parting acknowledgement, one colleague to another, for the end that was appreciated if not anticipated.  
  
"All I've ever heard about Fred Johnson was that he was some trigger happy little fish in the UN who decided he'd rather be a big fish in the OPA instead. A lazy and corrupt Earther," Bobbie said, her voice scratchy as if waking from a long slumber. Lines drew over her brow as she looked down at the body. Her next words more like a question than a statement, "Ayumi Khan was loyal to him to the very end.”

"Ah yes, these crazy Belters, so easily duped by someone who obviously didn’t deserve their loyalty,” he muttered caustically as he crossed his arms, the muscles in his neck pulling tight. At times he found the Martian mentality of moral superiority particularly grating, and this was one of them. When his Luna runs were covers for something that went further, he’d come across stranded Belter ships that ran afoul of Martian patrols. What he saw always gave him the excuse he needed to find ways to leave the equivalent of flaming dog shit on the Martian door steps.

Bobbie glanced up, and blinked, looking startled at his obvious annoyance. She seemed to mull over the underlying bite in his response and he wondered if this was going to end in blows. On the one hand, he did feel much more up to it, his wound had completely healed thanks to the efficacy of Mars battlefield medical technology. On the other hand, she’d likely beat him to an evenly distributed pulp if he let his guard down for even a second. To his surprise and non-insignificant amount of admiration, she replied stoically, her collected gaze cool as obsidian, "I've been wrong before."  
  
His left eyebrow lifted and the corner of his mouth pulled crookedly upward despite himself. Cotyar knew he looked much too pleased with himself for her to accept his reaction as what it was: a healthy dose of respect for someone who could admit and learn from their mistakes. In any case, by the looks of how she was shifting her weight to her heels, in all likelihood she was still unused to positive reactions to her that had nothing to do with how many records or bones she could break. And any amount of amusement from an Earther spy probably just made her fists itch on principle.

Cotyar grinned wider.

Bobbie reared back, retreating to hardness. "I'm not an idiot," she snapped indignantly, her chin retreating.  
  
"Good to know," he replied sarcastically, and at her icy glare, he gave back flatly, "I don't run ops with idiots. So unless you're fishing for a compliment--"  
  
Bobbie inhaled audibly and interjected, "Back there, how did she know Khan was a spy for Fred Johnson?"  
  
Cotyar closed his mouth. He answered with a question and a knowing smirk, "Why don't you ask her yourself?"

As if being a Martian marine made her immune to the magnetic draw of Chrisjen Avasarala. He'd seen more powerful men and women fall under Avasarala's thrall, blaming no one but themselves even when she used them like pawns. Hell, they probably deserved it, he mused.

They all did.  
  
Bobbie dodged clumsily, scoffing, "You don't know."  
  
He decided to let her off the hook this time, feeling almost...sympathetic to her feeble resistance. "I don't pretend to know every twist and turn of her mind, but this one I can guess. You want to know? Sure it won't pollute that pure no bullshit mind of yours?"  
  
"I want to know,” Bobbie said, unable to keep the inquisitive tone out of her voice. As if she saw a physical maneuver that she wanted to repeat and enhance.

Cotyar couldn’t remember the last time he was that eager to learn something new. That muscle had been worn out; weary from the passage of time and experience.

"All right then,” he offered, the skin beneath his eyes crinkling, “Khan had a dead man's switch on her, which means she knew the intel was worth life and death. And if she didn't like who was coming to her rescue, she'd just as soon dust everyone, herself included. Agreed?"  
  
Bobbie thought back, and after a brief pause, supplied, "Yes.”  
  
"We're not that far from Dawes' base, Ceres. If it was that important, she could have sent a direct distress call,” he continued.

“It was a general SOS instead,” Bobbie added, picking up on his train of thought, “She wanted to see if she could get someone else’s attention.”  
  
“So, someone on board Dawes’ ship who wasn’t working for Dawes. A spy, but who was she spying for? Johnson, or the two factions from Mars or Earth. If she was working for Errinwright or Korshunov, she could have just gone with Cortazar.”

Bobbie had walked up next to him by now, her eyes bright, “You didn’t send her and she wasn’t happy to see me, a Martian marine. The only one left is…Fred Johnson.”  
  
He nodded appreciatively, "Bingo."  
  
Bobbie glanced down and, more for her own benefit than his, whispered in barely concealed awe, "She just came up with that in a matter of seconds?"  
  
"UN Deputy Undersecretary Madam Chrisjen Avasarala didn't get to where she is now because she looked nice in a sari," he replied dryly.  
  
Bobbie tilted her head sideways, a speculative gleam in her eye. "Oh, so she can look nice then, not just old?"  
  
Cotyar impassively stepped right into Bobbie’s space, breathing her air, before he spelt it out, "She's the smartest, strongest, most stubborn woman I've ever met, and she likes to get shit done without needing to know all the details. So as far as I’m concerned, she’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met.”  
  
Blinking, Bobbie breathed, “You love her.”  
  
Cotyar backed off, chortling. "What's not to love? Sure, she infuriates me sometimes, but no one's perfect."  
  
Bobbie frowned, her head turning away with a tiny jerk.  
  
Cotyar observed quietly. She was a damn quick study, but there was still a ways to go.

“Do you know what makes me a good spy, Draper?” He didn’t wait for her to respond, “Once I've gotten all the information I can, I make my move and regardless of the result, I don't keep questioning my own decision. Otherwise I'm just carrying dead weight."  
  
"What's that got to do with anything?" she replied listlessly.  
  
He opened what seemed to be like scars from an old wound, "You knew Lopez on the Donnager."  
  
Bobbie was silent for so long that he thought she wasn't going to answer, but it only confirmed what he’d deduced.  
  
"I did a tour there," she said, finally, her jaw working. "I…knew him." Likely in the biblical sense.  
  
There, he made the surgical cut, "I'm guessing he worked intelligence.”  
  
She hurled back to meet him in the eyes, her demeanor decidedly unfriendly. "What are you trying to say? That I have a type?" she asked with false ease, her gaze sharp and brittle as broken glass.

He ignored the bait. “I’m saying you should practice putting your baggage down if you want to move forward.”  
  
Bobbie snorted, "Like you're the one to talk about baggage. Like you'd be here if it wasn't for your debt.”

It wasn’t getting through. What was he doing anyway? She’d learn soon enough.

"The only baggage I carry is my gun,” he said, all teeth.  
  
"It's not your adorable little gun I'm interested in.” She dropped her gaze suggestively.

"Really?” he rolled his eyes, “You're already on the team, Draper. Stop trying so hard."  
  
She stepped back a little, but instead being pissed off as he had expected, she regarded him with something that looked like pity, "Not everything has to have an ulterior motive. How do you ever get laid?"  
  
He shrugged and answered, "Drunk off my ass."  
  
"What?"  
  
"Only way to turn this off," he added, tapping at his right temple.  
  
She made a face at him, "Are you fucking with me?"

It was hard to figure who was fucking with whom at this point.  
  
"Why would I want to do that?" he asked, all smiles.

She considered his words and smile for a second before she chuckled softly, "You’re telling me you're not interested?"

Clearly there was no lack of confidence in that regard, and that just made it worse, or better, depending on whether he thinking with his head or his dick. For now, his cooler head prevailed.

"I'd have to be dead or playing for other teams to not be interested. I don't have a problem with you,” he came to a halt, mid-sentence, then decided it was pointless to stop there, “It’s how you’re going to handle your baggage that concerns me.”

He didn’t need to get to that point a third time, Bobbie picked it up, and she said, carefully, “You’re trying to tell me something.”  
  
No, he was just, in his unusually circumspect way, trying to make the fall shorter and less painful. As if Martian marine Bobbie Draper couldn’t handle herself. She seemed to have done fine thus far. He was getting soft, that was what it is. He ended it with a terse, “She wants to see you. Now.”

Bobbie snapped to it like the soldier she was, and was at the threshold before noticing his absence, “You’re not coming?”  
  
He scratched a non-existent itch at his side, "You'll see me soon enough.”

Bobbie let the cryptic comment pass, but licked her lips before continuing, “By the way, thanks for the armor. And the ammo. And…I’m glad you made it through, no worse for wear.”

Then she was gone before he could come up with a response.

Cotyar turned back to the body bag, where Khan rested in peace, and allowed himself a soft sigh.

“We’ve got to do what we've got do.”


	7. Chapter 7

“Bobbie. Come in, have a seat,” Avasarala beckoned within. She was already seated and patting the adjacent empty space on the small couch, greeting Bobbie with a smiling countenance despite the crescent of worried lines beneath her eyes.

Bobbie was tall for even a Martian. She trained to carry her body like a honed weapon made of brute strength and razor edges, looming over a battlefield like the namesake of her Goliath power armor. Yet standing there over Avasarala’s softly upturned face, Bobbie felt it inside her ribs, the now familiar ache building to a full bloom. It was no longer an ineffable yearning. She recognized it in its fruition, the seed of it made clear as Avasarala smiled warmly her: the distilled desire to guard and protect superseding that of attacking and seizing, a near antithesis of what she trained for in her entire adult life.

Bobbie saved this woman’s life, this scheming Earther politician whom she once considered her enemy. And despite the roar of quid pro quo from her Martian brain, her all too human heart found itself drumming louder to the rhythm of a primordial grace: to protect what was hers. Whereas she had always resented being on any sort of defensive patrol or protection detail, it took the revelation of saving Chrisjen Avasarala to fully unearth that part of her. And all Avasarala did to set this nascent want to a fiery efflorescence was to simply sit there, gazing up at her with eyes that were somehow both dark and luminous at the same time, like the clearest of night skies.

Bobbie stared at the spot on the couch next to Avasarala and came to the assessment that wasn’t close or far enough. She wanted to be as close to Avasarala as a second skin, made of the strongest armor, to guard against the enemies that Avasarala kept close. She wanted to be as far from Avasarala as an orbiting satellite, armed with searing lasers, to flay the enemies that Avasarala didn’t expect. Bobbie wavered in place, so at odds with herself and her new possessive protectiveness that it was like stepping off a Martian dropship to another Earth, the gravity of Avasarala throwing her off her center.

Avasarala started to look concerned, so Bobbie knew she was probably beginning to turn a little green at the gills. She remembered what that Earther Nico once showed her, feet apart with her shoulders, raising her sightline until her eyes are locked on a bulkhead behind Avasarala.

“I’ll stand if that’s all right with you,” Bobbie managed to say.

“Sit down,” Avasarala demanded tersely, wide-eyed with consternation, likely trying to minimize the possibility of having Bobbie tossing her cookies in these small, minimally circulated quarters.

Bobbie’s gaze flickered back to the older woman, her brows gathering.

“Please?” Avasarala tried again, this time with a cajoling lilt, apparently deciding that Bobbie had taken exception to her tone.

Had it been any other Earther to use that tone with her, Bobbie would have handed them their teeth. Rather, it was just a token resistance to an inconsequential order to demonstrate that she was still her own person, even if she’d just as soon jump out of an airlock without a vac suit than let any harm come to Avasarala. As it was, once Avasarala asked in that low honeyed rasp, Bobbie found herself with her ass on the cushion and Avasarala’s breath nearly on her face.

“Are you all right?” Avasarala inquired gently, her hand coming to a rest over Bobbie’s left temple.

Bobbie swallowed, her muscles clenching as she fought the urge to lean into that hand. She could only nod back at the question. Avasarala’s eyes drop to her lips, as if unaccustomed to a silent answer. There her eyes stayed for a lingering beat. Bobbie parted her lips and inhaled her next breath with thready gasp.

Avasarala looked back up, and with a ghost of a smile, withdrew neatly back to her seat. “You’ll live,” she remarked, before adding smoothly, “Do I have something on my face?”

“What?” Bobbie stammered.

“You were...are staring. Rather intently.”

Bobbie cleared her throat and resisted the urge to pull at the collar of her shirt. Her brain felt like melted butter, so she said the first thing that popped into her mind.

“Cotyar said you didn’t get to your position by looking nice in a sari.”

A corner of Avasarala’s mouth twitched, and Bobbie wanted to veil herself in her own hair.

“It didn’t hurt, but I had been aiming for something better than fucking ‘nice,’” Avasarala finally replied with a mocking glower.

“Beautiful,” Bobbie uttered out loud, before amending post-haste, “He said.”

Avasarala raised an eyebrow. “Well, flattery will certainly get you everywhere,” she intoned, before abruptly regarding Bobbie with the full brunt of her attention, intricate plots weaving behind her eyes. The practiced smile returned.

The cushion pushed back against Bobbie’s shifting weight.

“I never did say ‘Thank you,’ for saving my life. You were rather extraordinary for a Martian marine,” Avasarala said, laying it on pretty thick.

Bobbie made a face. “You’re welcome, and I’m the only Martian marine you’ve ever met.” The mission Cotyar mentioned was starting on an ominous foot. She sighed, “Tell me what you want me to do.”

Avasarala didn’t pretend otherwise and gave Bobbie a hand terminal.

"What is this?" Bobbie asked carefully.

"That depends.” There was no lightness in Avasarala’s voice anymore, “If you wish, it could be a secret communiqué to Private Hillman's parents, Filipp and Emmaly Hillman."

Hilly. Oh god, she'd come back as a banshee screaming her little blond head off and decapitating people with just her forearms if she knew she died for a sales demo.

“Curious how a union president and a CEO managed to come together. The Hillmans really do run the entire terraforming operation, both the man power and the tech,” Avasarala remarked.

“Hilly always said the only thing they ever agreed on was wanting to see an atmosphere over Mars in their life time,” Bobbie remembered, the corner of her eyes crinkling at the memory, before something like ice ran down her spine. With a small hitch of breath, she looked from the terminal back to Avasarala.  “You want me to tell them about Project Caliban? They’ll never believe me. They've got Mars dust down to their marrow."

"You'd be surprised how one's perspective can change when it comes to a dead child,” Avasarala countered evenly, though a brief tightening of her mouth belied her grief.

Bobbie found a sudden interest in the gray pattern of the deck plating.

“Cotyar told you about my son.” It wasn’t a question. Avasarala tisked, “He usually isn’t so loose with his lips.”

Bobbie’s head snapped up, indignant for the ex-soldier for reasons to be explored later, “He wanted me to know that you’re fighting for a bigger cause. That even if I was a Martian, you would be a worthy master.”

“Is that right?” Avasarala supplied vaguely.

Bobbie was in her face now. “He trusted me enough to show me where he can be hurt.”

Avasarala was not one to back down, rather, she pointed out in the most damningly calm voice, “And now you know my greatest sorrow.”

Bobbie started, hunching back. She didn’t regret standing up for Cotyar, but it wasn’t like she sought it out, the high drama between these two. In fact, she wouldn’t have minded being kept in the dark about it.

“Mistakes were made.” Avasarala’s lower lip trembled, but she pulled it back tight as she continued, “We’re only human, after all. We can’t protect all that we love, much as we like to try.”

Bobbie’s hands curled to a hard fist.

After a deliberate pause that involved the avoidance of eye contact on both sides, Avasarala murmured, “Except I’ve ever only seen you making the hard decisions.”  She reached out, gently encasing Bobbie’s fists between her hands.

Bobbie watched with distant fascination as her own pulse raced underneath Avasarala’s warm touch. She could pull back, there was no force behind the contact, only feather light strokes of skin against skin. Her fingers uncurled beneath the spellbinding ministrations, exposing the fleshy peaks of her open palms.

“Will you show me? A soft place underneath the tough exterior?” Avasarala entreated, the pad of her fingers rubbing circles against the deep grooves of Bobbie’s palms, filling in the valleys and blurring the lines.

Bobbie licked her dried lips, her breath surging unsteadily as she managed a sound, “I…” A sting prickled beneath her eyes, but looking into Avasarala’s eyes, they were as hypnotic as her touch, a soporific illusion of a slow rising tide until the waters surrounded to pull her under. Bobbie had always wondered what it was like to drown.

“The ocean,” Bobbie gasped, tasting salt on her lips, “I’ll never see an ocean on Mars.” Her limbs shook uncontrollably as that lump in her throat grew. She was listing sideways when Avasarala caught her in an embrace.

Avasarala held Bobbie, now a veritable vacuum of anguish, and squeezed her tight. Bobbie’s breath broke through in a primal scream, the dam crushed beneath the onslaught of this precipitous release. Caught in the waves, the pain flowed through her unburdened with staggering peaks and troughs, vibrating into each organ and cell until the maelstrom wore itself out. Gradually, it sank back into the depths, leaving Bobbie limp and adrift if not for a pair of anchoring limbs with hands that soothed and stroked.

Panting softly in Avasarala’s arms, Bobbie let her heavy eyelids close and was unable to open them again in the immediate thereafter.

Bobbie slept.

It wasn’t long, when consciousness started to creep back, for her marine training was engrained, and the warm body against her was alluring but unfamiliar. Bobbie stirred, but between the blurred moments of slumber and wakefulness, she burrowed deeper into the faintly enticing scent of jasmine and sandalwood. And as she inhaled, her parting lips brushed against supple, heated skin. Without thinking, she rose up into the spot, placing an opened mouthed kiss. Hints of earthy spices melted on her tongue, her nerve endings crackling at the rustle of body against body with the heady promise of naked skin against skin…

“Ahh…ahem!”

Clarity shot into Bobbie’s brain and she leapt off Avasarala with such speed that it made her head swim. Red-faced against the glitter of Avasarala’s dark gaze, Bobbie stuttered, “Sorry, I fell asleep.”

Avasarala cleared her throat before replying. “You weren’t gone that long,” she said with an octave so low that the long unsatisfied regions of Bobbie’s body quivered with want, like strings tensing, waiting to be plucked.

Avasarala’s cheeks pinked at the unexpected depth of her own voice. And upon seeing that, Bobbie’s lust took a bewildering turn into a helpless adoration.  

“I’ll do it. I’ll tell the Hillmans the truth.”

Avasarala flinched, but this was what she wanted. Wasn’t it?

Avasarala sighed and reminded Bobbie, “There’s a distinct possibility that if the Hillmans believe you and those top shits at MCRN are still determined to see Project Caliban through…”

“That I may have single handedly set terraforming Mars back for another generation,” Bobbie concluded stoically for her. “I understand.”

But Avasarala knew of the storm the churned underneath. She grasped Bobbie’s face in her hands and asserted defiantly, “I have to believe that there are people like us there, that I'm not alone in trying to prevent an all out war. Not like those fucking idiots who would risk our very own humanity just to win.”

Bobbie reached up to cover Avasarala’s trembling hands with her own steady ones.

Avasarala continued, "Besides, whoever setup the scenario on Ganymede was obviously not sound of mind, since they chose your team to do it. You survived and the Hillmans are a force to be reckoned with."

Bobbie offered a stiff smile. "They wanted to test the hybrid against the best. We were the best."

“I don’t doubt it,” Avasarala said, brushing a thumb against the salty remnants above Bobbie’s cheeks.

Their hands still touched, fingers lightly entwined. Bobbie saw herself in Avasarala’s eyes, the pupils a gravity well of shade and shadow, a place to shed her armor and let the tides take her.

The thumb trailed below, until it skimmed the corner of her mouth. Bobbie felt a breath of air from a silent, weary sigh. She straightened and pulled Avasarala’s hands away.

“I should go and make the recording,” Bobbie said, making sure that whatever Avasarala saw in her eyes, none of it was regret.

“All right.” Avasarala stood, the steel back in her spine. “Give the terminal to Cotyar when you’re done. He’ll send it under the radar.”

When the door closed behind her, Bobbie felt like eons had passed, and it took more than a moment to remember the conversation she had with Cotyar. She would see him soon enough.

So that was what he meant.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm tired. :O


	8. Chapter 8

Bobbie dropped the hand terminal on his desk with a muted clack.  Cotyar glanced up at her with a steady, assessing gaze. If there was anger or regret in the choice that she made, it was locked down tight. Still, he took his time reaching for that hand terminal, waiting for a sudden course reversal that never came.

He flicked through Bobbie’s recording with a satisfied hum. “You came through quick. There may be hope for you yet.”

Bobbie crossed her arms coolly. “What did you expect? A tantrum?”

“Another punch to even things out?” he said, offering his other cheek.

“You should be so lucky, considering how this could screw over Mars terraforming for god knows how long,” Bobbie growled, waving her right fist. But there was no heat in her words.

“Chasing a dream of simpler times when you’ve already opened your eyes to a complicated world is an exercise in masochism,” Cotyar uttered plainly as he transferred contents of the hand terminal. “Unless you’re into that kind of thing.”

Bobbie had an expression on her face said she was more interested in inflicting pain on him rather than herself.

He raised an eyebrow at other recordings displayed, Bobbie quickly about faced and added, “There are two extra recordings. For the Travis and Sa’id’s families. They’re not as powerful as the Hillmans, but if all of this blows over, I want them to hear it from me. So if something happens to me…”

Cotyar chuckled.

Bobbie, stopped short, snarled, “What?!”

He picked out another hand terminal on his desk and tossed it to her. Upon catching it, Bobbie allowed it to scan her biometrics before opening the security and asset details for one Madam Chrisjen Avasarala.

Bobbie jerked her head up, stopping short of throwing the hand terminal back at him like a hot potato. “I could fuck up a lot of things with this,” she warned quietly.

Cotyar didn’t even bother to look up. “Holden seems to have dumb luck on his side, but keeping her in one piece? That takes a professional. If things go south on me, you’ll have step up and hit the ground running.” His gaze shifted up and he was anticipating her discomposure even as he continued, “Martian or not, you’ve got a good head on your shoulders and you’re a quick study.”

Bobbie grumbled through set teeth, “I’m not a spy. I can’t arrange covert comms—“

He waved at the screen that held her recordings, a convenient distraction from the smirk that he didn’t smother quickly enough. “We all need contingency plans. Not asking you to do everything my job entails, it’s not like there are a lot of other candidates around.”

Bobbie’s lips thinned as she carefully took back the terminal. “Fine, but…” she inhaled audibly before continuing with a startled jerk, like a calf being prodded, “…it’d be better if you didn’t die.”

Cotyar, with a slight nod at Bobbie, murmured quietly, “Likewise.” He turned back to his work with an aside, “Besides, that armor has one name on it and it sure as hell isn’t mine.”

From the corner of his eye, Bobbie rolled her shoulders, preening like he’d just complimented her only child. If only other people were that easy to please.

Bobbie coughed and gestured to the empty chair across the desk. “Mind if I stick around? I may have questions.”

“Be my guest,” he said off-handedly as he continued to process the package they were sending to the Hillmans. Aside from Bobbie’s recording, he’d need to include everything that they’ve gathered so far to backup her testimony. And that was just the content. He still had to line up the transfer points and obfuscate the data packets so that the whole package could reach his Martian asset without detection and make its way to the Hillmans.

“My asylum has been expedited,” Bobbie said as she came to the entry on herself, her voice wavering slightly.

Cotyar stopped what he was doing. He reached for a thermos and poured a generous amount of Martian coffee in a canteen cup before replying, “Yes.”

The rich scent wafted in the air, but not enough to distract her. “It says I’m now a legal resident of Luna,” Bobbie read, her jaw flexing like the words were in an unfamiliar language. But she shot him an inquiring look, “Why Luna and not Earth?”

_Avasarala called him in after her meeting with Bobbie._

“It occurs to me that if something should happen to me, Bobbie might be up the shit creek without a paddle,” she said.

He offered a non-committal grunt. Avasarala was running her thoughts through him, not by him. A higher level of articulation was unnecessary.

Avasarala went on as if he said nothing at all, as she wont to do, “I’ve expedited her residency on Luna. If things go to sideways, at least I have people there to see to her particular situation without interference from Earth.” She swiped some details to his hand terminal.

He glanced at it, and muttered deadpanned, “Am I already dead in this scenario?”

“Retreating to Luna is obviously the worst case scenario. If you were still alive and kicking I’d expect more. She did save your life,” Avasarala readily stated without breaking her train of thought.

Cotyar didn’t argue her point. Rather, he made a quick scrolling gesture on the terminal before piping up, “Don’t suppose you planned any contingencies for me?” His fingers keep flicking, though in a slower, leisurely pace.

Avasarala blinked, and then gave him a sharp side glare that was meant to declare him an insufferable human being. He let out a breath he was apparently holding, then let her unwavering focus wash over him, scratching that itch he never had until he met her. Except it was more than an itch now, he wanted to bask in the shimmering heat of her glare and feel the sweet sting of incisors behind those darkly rouged lips. Vaguely, he attributed the increased intensity of these wayward musings to his close brush with death and set it aside for later consideration.

“Don’t be such a little shit,” Avasarala snapped without teeth, “I know you can take care of yourself, I’d only interfere. In fact, I think you’d prefer it if I was permanently out of your life.”

Cotyar clamped his jaw to prevent an instinctual reply that would have only added to Avasarala’s endless supply of self-importance, even if most of it was warranted. But this soon after their kerfuffle onboard the Guanshiyin, some sincerity might be in order.

“Not really. Things were just getting interesting.”

It wasn’t every day that he could help stop bad guys from using an alien life form to wage an interplanetary war. Routine trials and tribulations of the trade this was not. Although the company could stand to be a little less reckless—must he be the only one going prematurely gray? Then again, if he was looking for color, Avasarala was full of it, vibrant and volatile, in all spectrums of jeweled light.

“Can’t say that my Luna runs have all been this exciting,” he concluded with a crooked grin.

_Avasarala returned his grin, her eyes a twinkle with shared mischief. A tug of something more than fondness and the like expanded inside him. Perhaps he needed to revisit those later considerations sooner than he thought._

Or maybe, Cotyar narrowed his eyes at the woman in front of him, it was because someone had proposed a less than platonic way to get over their escape from certain death.

“It’s a fair question,” Bobbie said defensively, taking his silence for a reluctance to clarify Avasarala’s decision to make her a resident of Luna.

Cotyar laced his fingers in front of him, tempted as he was to act out his exasperation, his cheek still smarted. “She has people on Luna. Her family is there right now. So if some of us don’t come back, they’ll make sure you get treated right.”

Bobbie’s brow furrowed to a new low and he gave in the urge to flick it flat. She jerked back, rubbing that space above the bridge of her nose. Her eyes rounded with incredulousness at the surprising and yes, juvenile, gesture.

He shrugged, swallowing a laugh at her comical expression. “Don’t worry about it, only the good die young, and she’s no angel.”

“By that measure, you’d both live forever,” Bobbie retorted.

“Perish the thought,” he said sardonically.

Her mouth downturned, Bobbie’s gaze went beyond the bulkhead and, from what he could surmise, over to the single moon that accompanied the Earth on its journey through the galaxy.

"What's he like?" she asked quietly.

Cotyar closed his eyes and drank his coffee, mildly wishing it was something stronger. "Who?"

"Mister Avasarala,” she clarified, though a bit too loudly even by her standards by the pinched look on her face.

He readily provided the dry facts, "He’s a professor of Sufi poetry.”

Bobbie rolled her eyes at that, but didn’t attempt a follow up. Cotyar found another cup under the table and poured her one. She inhaled the rich aroma and gulped it down like a soldier who didn’t know when the next break was coming. And as she set the cup down, he covered that coffee-warmed hand with his. Bobbie started but on the account of him plying her with caffeine, paused to see what he had to say.

“They’re set, but it’s not like she can turn it off. She’ll use whatever advantage she has. So, just hang on and enjoy the view.”

A tell-tale flush graced the Martian’s cheeks along with a flicker of disappointment in her eyes, still, she rebutted, “Is that what you’re doing?”

There was no need for her to go down where he hadn’t already paved a path. Cotyar let his gaze droop in a pantomime of sadness and regret. “You already know what I’m doing here.”

Predictably, Bobbie edged away, in adorably minute motions that were as loud as a full orchestra as far as he was concerned. In the ensuing silence he picked up his work again and set her back on her duties with an ominous promise. “Keep reading. There’ll be a test later.”

Bobbie stared, but he gave no sign of veracity or the lack there of. With a twist of her lips that seemed suspiciously like a pout, she went back to reading.

When Cotyar came back up for air, hours had passed. It was in fact after hours based on the Roci’s internal clock and the subtle tint of red in the cabin lights. He was ready for a bone cracking stretch of his stiffened limbs when he noted the dark tresses spilling across the other half of the table. He bent slightly at the waist to see Bobbie’s relaxed face set against the cool table surface in slumber. Her full lips were slightly open, but each breath was taken in silence, as if even in sleep, she’d learned to do so with cover and stealth. Still, to fall asleep in front an Earther spy?  A corner of his mouth pulled up. He moved to shake her awake, but inches before touching her right shoulder, he halted, his fingers curling inward. A good doze these days were plenty hard to catch already, no point in taking those precious moments of oblivion away.

Cotyar gingerly moved his way to the head, wanting a quick shower to chase the sleep away so he could claim another hour or two of work before heading to bed. No sooner than he stepped under the soft spray of water did a cacophonous racket sounded beyond the bathroom doors. He swiftly wrapped a towel around his waist and flatted himself next to the threshold before releasing the door. From his vantage point, everything was the same except for the overturned chair where Bobbie once sat. He’d taken his gun with him, given that this was still an unfamiliar ship. So, with his gun raised, he cautiously ventured out. There was nothing out of place, until he spied beyond the broken chair, a gasping and shivering shape in the corner.

“Cotyar? What is going on?” Avasarala’s alarmed voice demanded at the door. Given that her room was between his and Bobbie’s, the noise likely woke her up.

With an eye on Bobbie, he set his gun down and opened the door. Avasarala stood before him, different than the one he was familiar with. The dark rouges and coals she favored were replaced with dusky pinks and soft palettes of brown. Her long black hair sat loosely over her right shoulder, leaving the left uncovered. The delicate collarbone traced a smooth line over supple skin before dropping into that bare dip. A shot of heat stirred irritatingly beneath his belly.

Avasarala blinked owlishly at him. It occurred to him then that he was only wearing a towel and there was a woman cowering in the corner of his room. A panicked gasp came from that corner and Avasarala pushed in so swiftly that they would have slammed into each other if not for his quick reflexes to step aside.

Upon seeing Bobbie’s shaking form, Avasarala hurled about to face him, trembling and livid.

“What did you--”

Cotyar waited silently for her to finish, his arms crossed over his bare chest. His skin was tight with a sudden burst of cold.

Avasarala stopped, her eyes growing wide before skipping sideways, chagrined.

“What happened?” she asked lowly with a solicitous mien.  

“Considering the fact that she had a traumatic experience not long ago, additional stressors might have triggered a flashback,” he stated pedantically.  He didn’t bother to say where those stressors could have come from. As a professional lackey, it was his job to take it all, accusations and messes. A flare of temper drew out an additional terse response as he crossed the room back to where Bobbie was still present in body but not in mind. “I’ll take care of it.”

Cotyar was at about an arm’s length when he bent over, squatting and hunched over at Bobbie’s eye level. She was drenched in cold sweat, her hair matted around her face and neck, black tendrils crawling about ashen skin.

“Sergeant Draper,” he called out firmly.

He was rewarded with a single twitch in his direction, but it was enough of a turn that he could see that her eyes were wide as dinner plates and her pupils so large that he could barely make out the irises.

Hunching further and making himself small, Cotyar continued, “You’re having a flashback. It may seem real, but you’re here, on the Rocinante with Holden’s crew and UN Undersecretary Madam Chrisjen Avasarala.”

“He…he’s not wearing a vac suit,” Bobbie whispered urgently, the sounds strangled and hoarse, followed by a trembling gasp, “Can’t breathe, I can’t--“

“Draper! Listen to my voice. Take a breath. In. Out. In. Out.”

She clawed at her throat, pulling at the loose skin, leaving raw marks of inflamed red. The helpless panic in her whined.

Cotyar held back, knuckles white as he clenched his fists. Not yet, not yet.

“Deep breaths, Draper. Look around you. Isn’t this familiar? Haven’t you been on a frigate like this before? You’re not on Ganymede anymore.”

Her blank, far-off gaze shifted. It circled around him like it was chasing the sound of his voice. He spoke again.

“You saved us.”

Their eyes met, the oily film of blood and violence rippling back.

Within the next few progressively longer breaths, Bobbie slumped back against the wall, the coiled-tight tension unraveling and spilling out into her limbs as they went slack. But soon she was shivering again, body cooled as the adrenaline wore off.

Cotyar pivoted sideways and pulled a blanket out from the bunk, tucking it loosely around the neck without touching her. She was staring at him as he moved back, and as he settled back on his heels, her eyes drifted down, all tired and heavy-lidded weariness, except it was making him remember that he was still only wearing a towel.

“My ears are cold,” Bobbie complained gruffly.

A tiny smile lifted his mouth. Cotyar shuffled forward and sets his hands over said ears, kneading the intricate curves and the fleshy lobes beneath the calloused pads of his fingers. Her chin lifted, eyelashes fluttering like a cat’s purr. He was caught as Bobbie swiveled unexpectedly, and all he could do was let himself fall in next to her. By the speediness of how she burrowed into the crook of his neck like a heat seeking missile, this was a premeditated effort.

“I was afraid,” she mumbled into his neck. He felt a wet cheek brush into his hairline. Sweat, surely.

“Just because you were afraid doesn’t mean you weren’t brave,” Cotyar replied, expecting a chuckle or two from the borderline saccharine platitude, but got a weak squeeze on his arm instead. It filled in him familiar unease, this unpredictability. Her head turned, resting against him like she was settling in for a nap, until something caught her eye.

“What...”

Coytar followed Bobbie’s gaze out to the table across the cabin. He was mildly surprised to see Avasarala there, a cheek propped up with one hand, eyes closed in tired sleep. He thought she’d left, leaving the mess to him.

“You made a ruckus,” Cotyar explained half-heartedly.

“She’s nice,” Bobbie murmured fuzzily.

“Nice? You might be first person to think so,” he ground out, but kept his voice low anyhow.

Bobbie took a deep breath and edged closer to him, like she was imparting a secret.

“She smells nice, like…”

“Gin?”

Bobbie muffled a giggle into his shoulder, and he couldn’t help but smile crookedly over her head.

“No, it’s a flower…in a tea,” Bobbie whispered, grasping for the word. She touched her fingers to her lips as it came to her, “Jasmine.”

His gaze followed, dropping to her mouth. When he looked up, her dark eyes were half-mast with a shimmering intent. They didn’t speak, and yet something charged the silence between like a live undercurrent.

Bobbie’s left hand snaked down his right arm, drawing it under the blanket with light touches that left trails of warmth and sweat. Cotyar worked to steady his breaths, hazily aware that actions made after a flashback didn’t exactly come from a crystal clear mind. He just needed a moment to get his head on straight and get up from the floor. But he waited too long.

Bobbie had dragged his hand low, down her taut belly and underneath the waistband of her pants. Breath hitched, Cotyar turned to see if she even realized what she was doing, but she wasn’t even looking at him and that was when the whole thing finally tumbled off the rails.

_“Bobbie didn’t have to do the recording for us, but she's doing it and it…isn’t easy for her. So I’d like it if we could do our best to accommodate her requests.”_

_“Requests,” he repeated, canting his head to one side, checking for another angle of that word._

_Avasarala wasn’t known for being vague and yet. There was a new slightly jittery undertone that he couldn’t decipher. He supposed he’ll cross that bridge when he came to it._

_“Sure, a lifetime supply of cucumber sandwiches it is.”_

In her peaceful slumber, Avasarala’s face was relaxed with an innocence that was incongruent to her persona. Yet it was incandescent, radiant like a halo.

There was an anger bubbling up against that lightness. He was pissed and desperate and hopeless, because he loved her for the cruel angel that she was, because he could never ever be forgiven, because some fucking Martian saw that he was going to hell and decided she was taking the both of them on the scenic route.

Said Martian was panting, rubbing against his lax, unhelpful hand under the covers. With a wry twist of his mouth, Cotyar took a long exhale. Finally, he pressed the corner of his lips against her damp temple.

“You'll have to be quiet.”


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warning: This chapter has elements of dubcon.

“You’ll have to be quiet.”

If Bobbie had thought that woman asleep before her was an apparition of an oxygen starved mind, it skidded to a heart seizing stop at the orderly male voice that had penetrated the haze of her flashback. She tilted her heavy head to the source. Prickly hairs of an unshaven jaw grazed a rough yet unsatisfying path down her cheek. She caught Cotyar in profile. He looked nearly half asleep, but she knew he was alert and seeing the same Avasarala she was. Or else he wouldn’t have told her to be quiet, because he was first and foremost Avasarala’s spy and head of security, who happened to love the old battle-axe.

Oh.

Avasarala was here and she was real.

Here, she was a soft vision, different from the usual razor edges of light that at times left Bobbie stunned. A slumbering and undone Avasarala cast a delicious glow in the low light of the cabin. This Avasarala felt like a dream, the polar opposite of the nightmare that still clung to her wrists and ankles, dead weights made of monsters, enemies, ranks, and planets. Here and now, Avasarala was untitled and unarmed: lacking the blinding veneer of the UN’s most powerful stateswoman and without the ruthless glint of the Earth’s fiercest guardian. Now, she was a beckoning firelight against the frigid memory of a cold and airless atmosphere.

Bobbie leaned toward Avasarala, heart aflutter like moth wings. Yet, moving her limbs proved to be a frustrating endeavor. Her over-stressed body seemed to have closed up shop for the day, leaving a few essentials to mind the store. Those remaining alert had determined that the danger had passed. She would live, but what would be the point of living if not for satisfying those primal needs, especially when all the pieces were so tantalizingly within reach.

Trust Avasarala be the spark to set her aflame, rekindling a ravenous hunger. The heat freed a bone-deep yearning that bubbled into Bobbie’s blood, sending her pulse racing. Gathering in the thick of it was an aching throb between her legs.

The hand that she’d chosen in place of her own had been rather uncooperative. Bobbie was almost numb with want now, panting open mouthed with need, when finally, in a moment of sweet deliverance, the hand moved. With the hard ridge at the heel of its palm, the hand pressed down. It was almost innocent in its lack of specificity, a reciprocating movement set against the brazen undulation of her hips.   And yet her relief was so stark that she moaned from the very back of her throat and had to bite her lower lip to swallow the sound.

Oh.

The order for silence took on a more indecent connotation. A long finger denoted its intent by lightly tracing a path down the entrance of her sex. There it hovered with a maddeningly barely-there touch until she gathered enough wherewithal to claw impatiently at the hand sandwiched between her own and the relief that she sought. In a much obliging instant, the finger pushed into her, her grasping sex snug and slick around the invading member. A dexterous thumb remained outside, circling around a hidden peak. She trembled, drenched with anticipation, her heart hammering in her overheated ears. At last, the callused thumb impressed itself upon that hard-sought discovery, setting off an electrifying shock that charged her spine into a pining arch.

More.

She was senseless with that thought, her throat a vice caught between demand and command.  Her entire body tingled with arousal, pores opening to precious oxygen and yet she couldn’t quite catch her breath. She gasped, writhing and riding against the aggravatingly methodical fingers that kept her on the edge of the precipice. The digits stirred and pumped with the perversity of someone who enjoyed watching a pot boil. She wanted to scream, to let the room fill with the echo of her demand.

More what? Avasarala would ask, once awake. And when Avasarala saw them, Avasarala would leave, because Avasarala was married and set to fuck only the person Avasarala married. And when Avasarala fucked him, he’d be able to lick at those bared collar bones and take Avasarala’s smooth fingers into his mouth. Avasarala would not have any calluses anywhere. Avarasala would be soft all over, just like Avasarala was now, softened by Morpheus’ spell. He’d sink himself into Avasarala, set his teeth on that thin stretch skin between Avasarala’s neck and shoulder. And when Avasarala gasped at the pinch, he’d rolled Avasarala’s hardened nipples between his fingers until Avasarala arched those dark tips into his mouth like an offering. He’d lap them alternatively with his tongue, with the same deep pumping strokes below. The space between them would be a hot slick mess. The wet slap of skin against skin would be a lewd note punctuating their shuddering moans and keening whimpers. The sheets would wrinkle and stretch beneath them, the bed, shake and sway as they rode and rolled toward that pinnacle. When Avasarala climaxed, the room would fill with the spiced musky scent of Avasarala’s orgasm. And the limp and helpless Avasarala dying that little death under her would be the last triumphant push she needed to tip over the edge.

Bobbie came, biting down with all her might as she orgasmed, a tidal wave of scalding pleasure crashing through her. Her vision went snow blind white at the edges as she rode out the convulsions.

When the colors returned, she laid weakly against Coytar’s shoulder. Avasarala was still sitting at the table, eyes closed. Cotyar withdrew his hands, from between her teeth and her legs. One hand was bleeding from her bite, the other wet from getting her off.

Bobbie swallowed, an apology of sorts on her lips.

Cotyar pressed his mouth at her temple before she said the words. Bobbie sucked in a quiet breath, the skin beneath his lips burning. He gently held her chin with those bloody fingers and turned her head so that her gaze rested back on Avasarala. When he started to speak, she felt his gaze synced hers.

“That’s one way to enjoy the view,” he murmured.


	10. Chapter 10

“You looking for something?”

Cotyar kept rummaging through the cabinets but held out his wounded hand as a concession to acknowledge that the medbay was nominally the botanist’s domain. “Looking for something to fix this.”

“Something wrong with your hand?” Prax asked.

Cotyar sighed minutely, before muttering not so very quietly under his breath, “Something wrong with my head.” Given the life choices he was making lately.

Silence.

Then, Prax offered singularly, “I can help with your hand.” The man stood expectantly with a thin instrument at one of the empty beds. 

Cotyar shrugged without moving his shoulders. He sat on the bed and Prax squinted thoughtfully at him before leaning over his hand. As a healing light scanned over the crescent of teeth marks, Prax’s head bobbed slightly, as if readying himself to broach an uncomfortable subject.

Cotyar’s eyes went half-lidded. A good spy never shows his curiosity without meaning to, or to provoke a reaction.

“Holden’s crew, they try to do good, you know, to help people,” Prax said haltingly, sounding a little uncertain. But his shoulders straightened a tiny bit as he added, “They got those people out of Ganymede.”

Cotyar nodded slowly, though not sure why Prax was telling him this.

“You know, if you’re not being treated well, Holden’s the captain, so he might be able to help…”

Air made a u-turn in his windpipe. Cotyar coughed, “That’s…” He manically scratched his jaw, trying to coax out the words that were eluding him.

Prax looked up from the new pink skin that healed over the broken one. He blinked squarely at Cotyar. “My degree is in botany. It’s best if my medical skills or the lack thereof remain unchallenged.”

Cotyar carefully pulled his hand back. “I’ll keep that in mind.” So the botanist had teeth as well.

As Cotyar retreated, bewilderment flashed Prax’s eyes, as if an internal sequence of events had gone awry by his own hands. His next words came out in a tumble, “But we might not be heading to Io if we hadn’t boarded that ship. Whatever I think of your team, I’m thankful…” Prax glanced surreptitiously at him, a thread of desperation lacing that creaky turnaround.

Cotyar heaved a sigh. “I’m not saying I deserved it,” he said, flexing his hand, “but I could have been less of an asshole.” He added a shrug for effect. Though an actual asshole would have left Prax twisting in the wind instead of besmirching himself to set the man back on his original path of whatever it was.

“Oh,” Prax declared unnecessarily, “That’s a relief.” He made an effort to check their surroundings before imparting, “I’ll only do this once, to thank your team.”

The man came close, his next words a loud whisper in a Cotyar’s ear, “Fred Johnson has a sample of the protomolecule.”

Cotyar jerked, rearing away from Prax with surprise.

Prax jumped away, shaking his head. “Don’t ask me how I know.”

“This just keeps getting better. Excuse me,” Cotyar growled as he leapt off the bed and strolled stridently away. Around the corner, he stopped and sank back into the shadows.

“I’m not sure that was a good idea,” came Prax’s voice.

A woman’s belter drawl answered, “It can’t be mutually assured destruction if no one else knows about it. And Fred Johnson wouldn’t be the first person to abuse a great power, if we have to bring someone into the loop it might as well be someone who can do something about it.” Then after a short silence, Naomi added ruefully, “I’m sorry. I did it for the Belt, but I know the protomolecule—“

There was the loud clack of a drawer closing. Naomi said no more. There was a sigh.  

“I just want Mei back,” Prax sounded resigned.

Cotyar slinked away, having heard enough to determine the veracity of Prax’s statement. The mega shitstorm just grew another cell. Unfortunate, to say the least.

Go be a proper spy again, they said. Help the good guys again, they said. He could have refused to see Avasarala the day she asked him to join her. Would he have come if he’d known it was her? Please, as if he was some amateur who didn’t vet the people he was meeting first. He came because it was Avasarala and if she was cashing in those particular chips, there was more going on than she could handle on her own. He didn’t have it in him to refuse her. Even if he did, she didn’t bring up Charanpal’s funeral just to reminisce. He didn’t begrudge her. Much. It was part of her charm, the knife of ruthlessness hidden under a glittering hilt. Couldn’t really see the blade until it was being pulled out of some gut.

And even as he was shot on the Guanshiyin, he’d have to admire how she stuck a hand in there and got him out. Her entire hand had been covered in his blood. Honestly, he’d always thought it might end that way some day, metaphorically or otherwise, but now that he thought about it, he kind of enjoyed being in the field with her, watching her get her hands dirty, bleeding all over her.

Draper approached Avasarala’s cabin from across the way. The moment she spotted him, her chin lifted, but not so much that he couldn’t spot the rising blush across her cheeks. That seemed harmless enough, amusing even. It was the curled fists that that made him wary.

Oh well.

“No good deed goes unpunished,” he murmured to himself as he stood across from the Martian.

Draper took a breath and started, “Last night…”

“What about it?”

Cotyar wasn’t sure how much she remembered. He had lifted her onto his bed after the incident and taken a lengthy cold shower for all his troubles. In the shower, he had turned the water on max, allowing sound and vapor to escape through the small haphazard gap of the bathroom door. The soap he had dropped in the shower was a loud cacophony against the steady stream of splashing water. When he was done, Avasarala was gone, but Draper had only found a more comfortable position in his bed, her long limbs akimbo.

By then, he was cold, tired, and a touch peeved. So when he woke today, it was in Draper’s bed given that his had been commandeered. Consequently, it was another cold shower to wash off her scent and to subdue the increasing baseline of a frustrated libido. So kindly forgive his tired eyes if they now just happened to fall upon the region of Draper’s softly rising chest.

Draper made a humming sound that was equal parts smug and provocative. He dragged his eyes up to hers. She stepped into his personal space and tugged resolutely at the front of his jacket. He could see the striations of brown in her irises, a freckle on the side of her nose, and the slight pout of her bottom lip, wet as her tongue peeked out with a lick, flushed as her incisors bit into flesh.

“Come to my cabin, after hours,” she said, the invitation clear.

 His gaze flickered to Avasarala’s closed door next to them. A shot of irritation made his reply a flat monotone, “Is that a request?”

The heat in her gaze cooled a few degrees before the grip on his jacket went lax. She narrowed her eyes at him, uncertainty filling the space between them. Inexplicably, his gut hollowed. Draper didn’t deserve this, not when it was Avasarala and her holier than thou schemes that set them down this path. Still, as someone with a thick ledger of debts and collections, he liked to be clear with the line items. Just because he was a spy didn’t mean he kept tabs all the time. Sometimes he just liked being nice, doing a favor here, lending a hand there, orders or not.

“As much as I get out of being Avasarala’s right hand,” he said, graciously biting off the ‘literally’ when Draper’s gaze slid sideways, cheeks hotly flushed, “you don’t owe me anything.”

“Okay, I don’t owe you,” Draper acquiesced with a tug of her right shoulder; her eyes were back on his, steady without prevarication. “Although, I am sorry I bit you…” she continued, nodding down at his hand, the one with the new skin growing over the crescent of bite marks. She smiled darkly, “…there.”

All the blood in his head rushed south. He returned her smile and reached up to trace an index finger against the delicate shell of her ear, the nail scratching against skin like teeth. Draper sucked in a breath as her pupils dilated into liquid pools of obsidian. Quick to cool and quick to heat, and yet when she burned, he wanted to lick the flames.

Cotyar chuckled throatily, “Are you even going to offer me a drink first?”

“That depends. Will you be drinking or will you be getting drunk?” she asked purposefully.

He tilted his head. “The difference being?”

Draper shrugged nonchalantly, but her dark lashes fluttered as she set her intent gaze on him. “Drunks can’t follow directions.”

He surprised himself with a bark of laughter. “I like you, Draper. I do.” He took a moment to appreciate the pleased look on her face before leaning in, letting the stubble brush against her warm cheek before promising with a low whisper, “I’ll make sure we get off at the right stops.”

The door sprang open just as they did.

Avasarala stood there, imperious and impatient. Close but untouchable.

“If you’re both just going to stand there smirking, do it after we’ve stopped the war to end the entire human race for fuck’s sake.”

That may take a while.

He smiled.


	11. Chapter 11

It wasn’t as awkward as Bobbie thought it’d be, meeting the eyes of the people who had a hand in getting her off post freak-out. In her previous sexual encounters, all the participants obtained varying degrees of satisfaction and either planned another interlude or just got on with their lives. Only in this case she was fairly certain she was the only one who got any satisfaction worth mentioning. Hence the expectation of awkwardness. Except these Earthers didn’t care for meeting her expectations. Cotyar seemed to meet most situations with enough weary optimism that immediate satisfaction wasn’t necessary. And Avasarala was just too busy saving humanity to care whether some upstart Martian wanted to jump her bones.

Those bones sashayed back into the cabin, expecting Bobbie and Cotyar to follow like dutifully minions. But it wasn’t anger or irritation that made Bobbie curl her fingers into fists. It was all she could do instead of reaching out and wrap her hands around those flared swaggering hips. She wouldn’t be pulling Avasarala in and tucking her into her larger body until her fevered heat burned through their layers of compression fabric. No, she wouldn’t, no matter how much those hips beckoned her to reach out and dig in.

Cotyar pointedly cleared his throat. His knowing smirk grew into a mocking leer as he gestured for her to proceed ahead. His head readily canted for what would be unquestionably an excellent view of her ass.

Shrugging, Bobbie casually left a middle finger distended behind her back as she strolled in. The low laughter behind her was close enough that her spine instinctively went rigid, but the murmured word that followed was oxygen to flames, setting her insides to a melt.

“Later.”

There were definitely worse ways to spend an evening. Or a day, Bobbie mused as Avasarala made a face at what one would assume to be substandard tea in her bulb. Avasarala sipped carefully and swallowed with a horrified grimace.

Cotyar turned away with an eye roll, but the lines of muscles on his neck were strained as his lips thinned with the effort of containing a grin. The beginnings of envy squeezed in Bobbie’s chest. This wasn’t just a debt being paid.

“I fucking hate space,” Avasarala declared, before setting her flashing eyes on Cotyar, snarling, “Tell me we have Souther.”

“Our asset on the Okimbo got an encrypted line through,” Cotyar replied, pulling out a hand terminal. Avasarala was halfway out of her seat before Cotyar dropped his hand, moving the terminal out of her reach. “You do remember that Souther said you had, and I quote, 'dead eyes and a poison tongue'? Oh, and one of the worst person he's ever met."

Bobbie's eyes grew incredulous. "We’re asking this person for help?"

Avasarala batted her hand in the air. “Once he realizes what Errinwright has been doing, he’ll come around.”

"And he just happened to be in command of the UN Jupiter Fleet?” Cotyar asked. His huff thereafter told Bobbie that the question was rhetorical.

Avasarala’s answering smile was razor sharp.

“Did you…plan this?" Bobbie wasn’t sure if she was afraid or turned on. Or both.

"It's never good to have all your eggs in one basket. And if we’re going to war with that motherfucker Errinwright, Souther is as good it gets. He was formerly the head of the UN Fleet Command. We don't just give that position to some random person on the street."

"No,” Cotyar added dryly, scratching his stubbled chin, “You just give it to the people who are willing to disagree loudly with your suggestions and insult you to your face.”

Bobbie opened her mouth, but all the possible things she could say tumbled against the back of her throat. She felt ridiculous, to be rendered suddenly mute when there were so many thing she could say that would get her a chance at being the head of UN Fleet Command.

Avasarala scrolled through Cotyar’s surrendered hand terminal. Without missing a beat, Avasarala asked smoothly, her eyes still on the screen, “Did you have something to say, Bobbie?”

Bobbie froze. “No,” she relented, before shooting a dour look at Cotyar.

‘So close,’ he mouthed, shaking his head at her.

She flashed him her left canine and snapped back, ‘Bite me.’

Cotyar gave her a thorough once over that ended with a toothy grin. Bobbie glanced away, her cheeks warm. Cotyar turned back to Avasarala.

“Our asset also sent over some strange power readings from Io captured during a sensor array rotation. Could give us a hint of what we’re heading into if we can get a comparison to Ganymede. I could enlist Nagata’s help, given they’ve actually seen the Caliban facility on Ganymede.”

Avasarala narrowed her eyes. “But…”

“Nagata gave Fred Johnson a sample of the protomolecule.”

If Avasarala was surprised, she didn’t show it.

“So she’s OPA? One of their factions tried to kill you,” Bobbie stated solemnly. Her stance subtly shifted into battle mode, muscles and tendons tensing, until the menace of her lethal capabilities stood out like claws on full display. The beast behind her brain opened its red eyes with a yawn.

Avasarala blinked at this transformation, yet Bobbie knew it wasn’t fear that gleamed in her eyes. Blood pounded in her ears. The older woman raised an eyebrow at Cotyar.

He replied with a shrug, adding, “She’s being read in. None of our secrets are safe now.” His expression was sly as he offered Bobbie his bare throat, “We’re completely at your mercy.”

Bobbie growled.

“Bobbie,” Avasarala said, her placating words laced with amusement, “if I treated everyone who has ever wanted me dead as an enemy—“

“She’d have no friends,” Cotyar finished, placing a light hand on Bobbie’s tensed shoulders.

Friends. The beast rolled on to its back, its belly bared. Avasarala’s gaze was soft and fond and the beast was now panting, eager to lick her face. The beast’s memory was ephemeral. It didn’t remember the before, when all it wanted was to snap the Earthers in half and roar with the call of Martian victory. Avasarala’s guard dog looked on warily, its weary eyes never the less alert.

Bobbie glanced over at Cotyar with a furrow between her brows. “Your job sucks.”

Cotyar’s mouth fell open. Before Bobbie realized what was happening, his arms were wrapped around her.

“Finally, someone who understands,” Cotyar sighed.

She stood dumbly as Cotyar’s arms tightened around her with a series of hearty pats.

“Do you need me to step outside?” Avasarala asked drolly.

Bobbie stared at her. She turned her head minutely until her cheek was flushed against Cotyar. Cotyar’s hands stopped between her shoulder blades, his fingers biting into her back. Bobbie held Avasarala’s eyes as she rubbed up against him, cheek to jaw, her lips open with an inaudible sigh.

“No.”

Avasarala’s face flushed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "I fucking hate space," is canon Avasarala. XD


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I started writing before season 3, half way there I started reading the books, and now S3 is in progress so my head is bees. But how awesome is it that the show is exceeding my meager, tiny, miniscule OT3 expectations?!?!?! Come squee & ugly cry at S3 with me on tumblr if you’re into that kind of thing. XD

Avasarala fucking hated space. She knew the air, the temperature, and the artificial gravity of the Rocinante—renamed as such by James Overly Earnest Shit Magnet Holden, why was she not surprised--was regulated down to a ridiculous number of decimal points. If only so the Martians could be assholes about how advanced their ships were. It wasn’t Earth, but it wasn’t some rust bucket, and technically she was supposed to feel lighter. But all she ever felt from being in space was the merciless cold vacuum shrouding her like a veil, and she a bride waiting for Death. Melodramatic, yes, but being in space, it hurt.

Charanpal died in space. On a regular day on Earth, she’d think of her son the moment she woke because she was alive and he wasn’t and how was that possible, and the moment she went to sleep because oblivion was welcomed when the world still rotated but the one person that mattered so much was no longer there. In space, the wound ached persistently like a phantom limb. Her baby, dying in a place where even the mercy of a last breath was robbed from him.

More children will be dying if she couldn’t stop Errinwright and Mao.

So Avasarala just had to keep her shit together, and try not to think about how her plan of a slow and steady political seduction became road-kill to a Martian marine hell bent on breaking all the rules. She’d also feel less annoyed if her hired gun/spy didn’t seem so terribly amused by it all. He had recently acquired an omnipresent curl at the corner of his smart ass mouth. Granted, it was actually not a bad look since he had the wherewithal to dare such insolence. On a simpleton it would be ridiculous. On someone who knew how to wield his skill set just so, well, had she been younger…

…had she been younger she would have done something about the invitation in Bobbie’s eyes. She was not immune to the ample charms of the statuesque Martian woman, especially when Bobbie held her gaze with such a hungry precision that she felt the answering tug of a hollow ache beneath her. And with Cotyar standing between them, the offer was both tempting and efficacious. Certainly enough for an old woman to blush like a school girl.

But she was so exhausted, knowing that they stood on the razor edge of war, that she must use every tool she had to keep the Sol system from collapsing into a point of no return. All while dealing with space and feeling like her heart had floated up to her throat and made itself home there. Yet apparently as she kept her eyes on the fucking prize, her Martian protection detail kept her eyes on fucking her.

Avasarala’s lips pursed against a burst of the hysterically tired giggles.

She had wanted Bobbie on her side, not in her pants. Necessarily.

It was how spent she was, that it was almost a second after the giggles when it occurred to Avasarala that people usually don’t take kindly to laughter when offering themselves. But despite being people shaped, Bobbie didn’t fit into people expectations. There had been clues along the way. The big one being the diplomatic incident Bobbie caused by punching out her Martian superior and asking for asylum from her most hated enemy. Avasarala should have seen it coming. Instead it knocked both the mirth and wind out of her when Bobbie’s hot gaze turned adoringly concerned, as if she could see the great weight on her shoulders and the little cracks that were starting to appear.

Avasarala tightened her grip on the hand terminal.

For all that Bobbie was a volatile factor, her steady presence and unapologetic infatuation was a balm to Avasarala’s chaotic circumstances. It took more effort than Avasarala liked to center back into herself. The weariest and barest parts of her wanted to lean into the embrace that Bobbie was offering.

Shit.

“Cotyar, how the fuck does this work?” Avasarala hazarded an old person’s complaint, poking at the hand terminal he’d given her like a troglodyte.  

Cotyar backed away from Bobbie, his gaze unusually low as he approached her. He leaned in close, head bowed, with a hip raised to bring him half seated on her desk. Avasarala narrowed her eyes, a hiss rattling behind her throat. Finally, Cotyar, with uncharacteristic demureness, looked up at her, at last exposing the silent laughter crinkling the skin beneath his eyes. Heat rose to her cheeks. She forced her chin to remain dignifiedly upright, but her gaze fell elsewhere if only to plot his eventual disappearance. But Cotyar was close enough that she could still feel his amusement through his body heat. His thigh was sitting next to her arm.

Avasarala suddenly imagined her hand there, kneading upward. His skin growing hot beneath the sure pressure of her fingers until he was a squirming mess, his cavalier smile contorted into a frustrated grimace. She smirked unrepentantly at the thrumming of power flowing back into her veins. If she wanted to, she could bring them all to heel, one way or another. She excelled at giving people what they wanted in the worst possible way. Avasarala shot a sharp glance at Cotyar, ignoring the way that his eyes gleamed, as if he liked it when she was being an unholy pain in the ass.

“Does she not know that I’m spoken for?” she asked lowly, yet somehow spitting out the last overly florid words like a curse.

“Oh, she knows. You couldn’t help yourself and now she can’t either,” Cotyar answered with a grin and an exasperated roll of his eyes.

Avasarala huffily glared daggers at him.

Cotyar returned her daggers with a chiding expression of woe-is-you. “You break it, you buy it.”

She didn’t break anyone, much less a Martian marine. Sure, she might have turned Bobbie’s world upside down and gotten a new protection detail out of it instead of a Martian bullet to the head, but it had been for fate of humanity. Besides, Bobbie was young, strong, and malleable. She was old, tired, and keeping her shit together through sheer force of will.

Out of the corner of her eye, Bobbie glanced surreptitiously at them like the last awkward person left out of the picking of teams. Avasarala’s chest grew tight again, the heart in her throat lodged stubbornly in her airway.

No. She didn’t need this. She didn’t. Arjun was back on Luna, his head full of words and his heart full of poetry. The loveliest ones he reserved only for her.

Avasarala dropped the hand terminal with a clack. Her pulse raced as if catching up to some invisible point, to stop the inevitable from happening. She ignored it with practiced ease and asked succinctly, “If I have to do everything myself, what do I need you for?”

Cotyar’s lopsided grin faded with a blink. He silently took the hand terminal that would enable her to send a message out to Souther and pressed on a particular spot to open the encrypted recording function. An all too familiar interface hovered above the handheld, blinking its readiness to start. He handed it back to her.

“You’re welcome,” he said, softly.

Cotyar slid off her desk and strode over to pick Bobbie up at her elbow. Bobbie bristled at the strident gesture, but something in his expression made her eyes go wide and her mouth clamp shut. Avasarala watched as they exited her cabin without another word.

Fuck.


	13. Chapter 13

Cotyar was a fairly good spy. First-rate, Avasarala had flattered once. So, at least skilled enough that she had deemed it necessary to wheedle into his good graces with a straight face. The motions that came naturally with those skills, he found it easier to just let ride even if others found them unnerving. Thus, on a ship that was not his own, friendly or not, his gait was one that made little sound.

“So a Martian marine, an Earther bodyguard, and an UN politician walk into a bar…” began a male Martian drawl.

Cotyar stopped beyond the line of sight to the galley. It wasn’t that he wanted to listen in on their hosts, impolite as it was, but since it opportunity so neatly presented itself, who was he to disregard it?

“Where’s the punch line?” the big lug named Amos asked, with a loud yawn at the question mark.

“I just can’t get my head around it,” Alex continued without following through on the joke, letting incredulity take over instead, “I mean, the bodyguard and the politician is easy. But the marine, the Martian marine? That one is a killing machine who uses the UN symbol for target practice. It’s a bit of a head trip.”

“They seem to like each other well enough,” Captain Holden relayed with a melancholy undertone.

“You mean, like like?” Alex’s scandalized murmur was more performance than the minimization of sound. Cotyar still heard him, clear as a bell. The pilot added for gratuitous clarity, “Like a beast with two backs?”

“Isn’t it three backs?” Amos counted, his voice was now more alert for reasons Cotyar would rather not dwell on.

“Yeah, you’re right…wait, what?” Correct on a technicality, but Amos was going in a direction that Alex clearly found discombobulating.

“Madam Chrissie could be doing them both,” Amos speculated. Then he continued, without an outward trace of enmity, reminding Cotyar of a saying about how barking dogs don’t bite, “It’s what bosses do. Screw the people under them.”

Someone who sounded a lot like Holden cleared his throat.

“Um, she’s kind of an old lady,” Alex countered quickly, sounding eager to steer away from that particular topic. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, she convinced a Martian marine to work for her so she can probably get me killed without lifting a finger, or bomb the shit out of a moon with her morning tea, but--”

“You don’t get to her age looking like that and not learn a few tricks.”

Alex choked at Amos’s rejoinder, coughing uncontrollably. And just as he managed a few calming breaths, Amos appended, “I’d do her if she let me.”

The cough resumed, but Alex managed to get out, “You’d do anyone if they let you.”

The galley quieted unnaturally, and Cotyar knew of all the people in the galley, it was more than likely that Amos was the one engendering the hush. He had no doubt the burly mechanic could have that effect on people, should he choose to employ it.

“Not anyone,” Amos concluded, after the surveying silence.

Cotyar could barely make out the exaggerated gasps of offense that followed. He snorted inaudibly. Despite the characters on the ship, they were a tight-knit group who knew where to punch and where to tickle.

There was a dull clap, like a hand against something too solid to move. “I don’t think she can handle you, buddy,” Alex ingratiated. “Not if she’s already got those two on the side.”

Holden spoke up, pedantic but wry with experience, “Well, if they are a threesome and someone needs to bow out for a bit, the other two people can keep going.”

A new voice calmly informed, “Many plants can also reproduce asexually.”

Prax’s ability to kill a conversation dead in its tracks rivaled that of Amos.

“Man, why you gotta bring reproduction into this?” Alex grumbled at last.

A shadow stretched onto the deck. Cotyar didn’t bother to straighten from his position.

“What are you doing?” Bobbie asked, loud enough to be overheard by the people he had been listening to.

“Eavesdropping,” Cotyar answered, in more or less the same decibel.

Her nose instinctively bunched with distaste, but upon what seemed like reflection behind a few quick blinks, Bobbie settled for look of bewilderment. “It’s an open galley. What could they possibly be saying to make that worthwhile?”

Cotyar shrugged, and strolled into the galley. He hid a double take behind a scratch of his jaw at the presence of Naomi, sitting next to Prax. She had been there the whole time. He reconsidered the conversation, then the crew. So, tight-knit, but fraying at the edges. Or the belter woman was just smarter about talking in confined spaces. With strangers on board the ship, conversations should always be more discreet. Although, she didn’t exactly stop the men from expounding on the sexual inclinations of the ship’s new passengers. Both, then. He thought back to the last time he heard her voice, and smiled humorlessly. He would have to agree with Avasarala's impression that the engineer probably had more to do with this crew's survival than its captain.

Bobbie was frowning. None of the men would meet her eyes, aside from Amos, but that was to be expected. If she wanted to intimidate him, it was going to take more than a frown. Bobbie apparently felt the same, because she went back glaring at the head tops of the other men.

Cotyar leaned against the wall, absentmindedly rotating his coffee bulb on the countertop while waiting for his meal tray to warm. Watching with mildly detached amusement.

Holden finally stood up, taking his empty tray and bulb, pretending there wasn’t a Martian marine burning inquisitive holes into his back. At the coffee machine, Holden glanced sideways into the bulb Cotyar had stopped rotating.

“Top up?” Holden offered with a stiff smile.

Cotyar waited until the smile began to falter. He pushed the cup at the captain. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it,” Holden replied easily. But the words settled and Holden’s eyes grew painfully plaintive.

In another time and place, Cotyar might have liked James Holden. He reached over for the filled cup and sipped the hot liquid.

“It’s good,” he mused.

As if taking that as a sign, the Roci crew began clearing out en mass, emptying the room. Bobbie took in all of this with obvious displeasure, but didn’t say anything until the last one of the crew, who happened to be Alex, almost cleared the galley threshold.

“You’re not going to tell me?”

The pilot stumbled. Bobbie snickered.

Cotyar shot her an exasperated sidelong glance and tossed her previous sentiments back at her, “You were right. It wasn’t worthwhile.”

Alex righted himself and gave Cotyar a small salute before continuing on his way. Bobbie narrowed her eyes at the retreat of her fellow Martian and turned back to Cotyar, snidely miming his words. He ignored her, but kept smirking into his food. Finally, she doubly flipped him off and left it at that. They made quick work of lunch without speaking further, the lesson of the Roci crew still clear in their heads.

“Wait,” Cotyar called out flatly as Bobbie made the motions to depart.

Bobbie stopped, a brow raised, her eyes glittering. As much as he hated to disappoint, he merely shoved another warmed tray at her. She stared with confusion at the full meal in her hand, until he wrapped her other hand around a tea bulb. The importance of her mission to feed Avasarala made her snap up straight. But she didn’t go. Not right away.

“You still mad at her?”

He clenched his jaw. “One has to keep up appearances.”

“Why?” she asked baldly.

“Because if you give her an inch, she’ll take a mile and figure out how to screw you with it.”

The corner of her mouth twitched. “Seems like you’ve been giving her more than an inch then.”

He smiled nastily. “Jealous?”

Bobbie’s cheeks stained adorably pink. He shoved her none too lightly.

“Go!”

With any luck, Avasarala would get to see what he just saw.

And squirm.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This show is making me anxious.

Bobbie entered the cabin and didn’t miss the way that Avasarala casually looked behind her. The glance whipped away when the door closed unceremoniously. Bobbie felt wise not to mention it as she sat the food and tea down on the desk. Avasarala tilted her head, obliquely peering up at her. The slope of her neck was a long stretch of bare skin, of which Bobbie’s lips had made a sadly very brief acquaintance. Bobbie swallowed dryly.

“Did you run here?” Avasarala asked, her tone gentle and innocuous.

Bobbie blinked away the flicker of recollection. Some innate spider sense tingled. She couldn’t help answering with caution.

“No?”

Avasarala turned away, uncrossing and crossing her legs beneath the desk in one fluid motion. She said to the holo in front of her, “You look a bit flushed. Take a seat for a bit.”

Bobbie followed the command first, but once she sat, Avasarala’s other words penetrated. The cause of said flush came flooding back in a rush. For a second her cheeks burned so hot that she ducked her head. Her jaw set so rigidly she heard her own teeth in her ears. The situation was getting out of control, and if there was one thing a marine valued, it was control. This wasn’t her first crush, but coming down from actual life/death battles and all the protoshit fuckedupness made the craving spiral into an almost unrecognizable intensity. And the two people she was hanging around didn’t so much help as to add reaction mass into the drive that was already running dirty and hot. Bobbie pressed her thighs together, pressure to relieve the thick ache between her legs. The edges of her vision swam with waves of heat. She really, really, wanted to get laid. But first, she had to make sure to complete the mission Cotyar gave her.

Bobbie glared at the untouched food next to Avasarala. “You need a poison taster or something?” she cracked.

Avarasala glanced sideways at her with a look that vacillated between a reproof and a warning.

Right, she wasn’t exactly adroit at playing peacemaker, and this could backfire, but Bobbie felt compelled to try. Her fingers twitched, drumming against her thigh. “I could get him in here.”

In fact, the room already felt too small and warm, what was one more person? Maybe they might even trip over each other and accidentally fuck. She shifted in her seat.

Avasarala turned up her nose. “He’s still got that bug up his ass.”

“You’re the one that put it there!” Bobbie shot up, the volume of her voice increasing, “I don’t even know why you guys are fighting.”

Avasarala scowled at an indiscriminate spot in front of her. “His temper tantrum isn’t my number one priority at the moment.”

Bobbie stared at Avasarala, her jaw agape. If Cotyar was pissed, she was 99% sure Avasarala was at fault. She adored the woman but she wasn’t blind to the fact that Avasarala could be a huge manipulative pain in the ass—whatever gets the shit done. And the fact that Cotyar’s number one job was keeping Avasarala breathing, well, it was impossible not to side with him even if she wasn’t quite sure what was going on.

“He saved your life,” Bobbie reminded Avasarala. Surely that should count towards a reconciliation of sorts.

Avasarala looked up with a faint but fond smile. The outline of her upturned face was a match for the hands that could be there, holding her at that perfect angle for a descending kiss.

“You saved my life,” Avasarala corrected, crooning in that graveled baritone.

All of Bobbie’s harried senses overloaded. Bobbie gasped under her breathe as her under-armor automatically flexed, applying smart compression to the points on her body where blood suddenly rushed and skin abruptly puckered. As a standard feature, it wouldn’t normally even register. But when has anything been normal since meeting Avasarala?  Of course the sound of Avasarala’s voice appealing to her ego made Bobbie the horniest she’d ever been in her life. But goddamn it, she had to stay on track. Bobbie’s lizard brain trembled and howled, but she took a deep shuddering breath and a measured step back before meeting Avasarala’s eyes again. Avasalara was all wide-eyed innocence, but within the tiny pout of her full bottom lip was a silken trap. No, Bobbie wasn’t falling for it, even if the stinging pleasure radiating from her chest and hollowing throb pulsing between her thighs strongly suggested that it was a very close thing.

“Did you think to bring my armor on Mao’s ship?” Bobbie mentally high-fived herself for managing to sound coherent and logical. Avasarala was a politician, it was highly unlikely that she gave a second thought to the Goliath III armor left in UN possession when her head was filled with ways to bend people to her will with the right words.

Avasarala’s nose wrinkled. “No,” she answered truthfully.

“Then he saved all our lives. I couldn’t have done half of what I did without my armor.”

It shouldn’t be possible, but Avasarala managed an elegant snort. “You wear it, it doesn’t wear you. I’m sure you would have thought of something else.”

Bobbie flushed, caught between wanting to screw or strangle this woman. The trust and confidence that came out of nowhere and the pure reckless and blatant disregard for her own safety was driving Bobbie nuts. She could see in her mind’s eye Cotyar shaking his head with pity. Her shoulders stiffed with offense at the imaginary slight, and her brain was just too fried to stop the words from tumbling out of her mouth.

“He loves you, you know.”

Avasarala blinked at her. For a second something in Avasarala’s face changed. If there had been an ethereal glow about her when she was asleep, this was the wondrous dawn. But as quickly as the mask slipped, it was back on again.

“I’m a difficult person to love,” Avasarala unanswered, smiling slyly, smooth and practiced.

Bobbie held her gaze, but Avasarala’s smile never faltered. Bobbie suspect it wouldn’t, but she still couldn’t help the raw pang of disappointment. Having seen a glimpse of what was behind the mask, Avasarala’s manipulations tasted like dry Martian dust in her mouth. Avasarala was Mars and Avasarala was the stubborn sands that refused to give up its ability to get into everything and be terraformed back into the rich life-giving soil it once was. It was almost pathetic, how much Bobbie loved Mars.

“No, you're not,” Bobbie countered with an empty laugh, the marrow in her bones aching with hurt, “You make it too easy. And then we’re all scared to death of disappointing you. Some people can’t deal with that. Maybe that’s how your friends become your enemies.”

Avasarala’s eyes flashed, her mouth going stiff.

How was it possible to feel keyed up and exhausted at the same time?  Chrisjen fucking Avasarala, that was how.

“You should eat.” Bobbie pointed her chin at the tray.

Avasarala narrowed her eyes at her. Bobbie narrowed back and crossed her arms. On this, Bobbie was not backing down.

Finally, Avasarala closed the holo screens and set aside the handheld. She made the effort to center the tray and the utensils, and set the bulb of tea in the upper corner within arm’s reach. The items were set as if she wasn’t on a Martian frigate, but at a fine dining establishment. She ate the food with such a deliberate composure that it was like she was showing Bobbie via dining manners who was the bigger, more civilized person in the room.

Bobbie waited stoically for Avasarala to finish, hands clasped behind her back, staring straight ahead until she confirmed Avasarala was done from the corner of her eye. When she reached to dispose of the tray, Avasarala quickly placed a hand on top of hers. Had she looked up, Bobbie would have seen the determined calculation in Avasarala’s dark eyes. As it was, Bobbie just stared at contrast of thin, fragile fingers on top of her own broad, strong ones. She offered zero resistance as Avasarala proceeded to pull, taking in her hand with both of hers. Bobbie knew that her strings were literally being pulled, but seeing herself in Avasarala’s intent, glittering gaze, she just didn’t fucking care. Blood hammered in Bobbie’s ears. Her skin prickled, thirsty for contact, yearning for touch.

“Bobbie,” Avasarala stated, gazing at her the same way she had once looked up at a ‘blue moon’ back on Earth, “You won’t ever disappoint me.” Without breaking their eye contact, Avasarala lifted Bobbie’s hand and placed a soft kiss on top of it.

Bobbie opened her mouth, but no sounds were coming out. She shifted unthinkingly to close the physical space between them, only to be stopped by Avasarala’s right hand. The hand was gentle but firm on her cheek, the mere inches between them now a chasm.

“Thank you,” Avasarala said, warm but distant, her eyes a shade contrite.

Bobbie left Avasarala’s in a frazzled daze. She mechanically dumped the tray in the nearest recycler and stared back in the direction of Avasarala’s cabin.

“Fuck,” she muttered under her breath.

Bobbie’s eyes slid to the door next to Avasarala’s. She fled back into her cabin. Grabbing a tall bottle from a locker, she set herself in front of Cotyar’s door, barging in just as soon as she was allowed.

Cotyar squinted at her as she seated herself and slammed the bottle on the table.

Bobbie flexed her fingers, clenching and unclenching them before the tic registered in her brain and she laid them flat instead.

“You busy?” she asked with false obliviousness, ignoring the multiple holos hovering above his handheld.

Cotyar grunted noncommittally. It was the encouragement Bobbie needed.

“You look like you need a drink,” she commented, and unscrewed the bottle she brought. She grabbed his cup and sniffed at the dense aroma of the cold black coffee that was left. Shrugging, she poured the clear contents of the bottle into the coffee and presented it to him.

Cotyar took it carefully, his eyes tracking her like she was a combustible danger. Bobbie impatiently gestured with her hand, miming a drinking motion. The corner of his mouth lifted before he brought the drink to his lips. He managed to swallow a good sip before coughing, the foul liquid searing a path on its way down.

“I see you found the still,” Cotyar managed to croak out.

“These people used to be ice haulers. I asked Amos where the still was and he asked which one.” Bobbie flicked at the tall bottle. “This one’s the vintage.”

“Thanks,” he replied dubiously, but upon a narrow-eyed consideration at the remaining drink, tossed it back anyway. Bobbie wondered if he figured it out, and tried not to read too much into the gesture.

Cotyar leaned back in his seat, his head slightly askew as he observed her from half-lidded eyes. He turned halfway aside to scratch at a spot on his jaw, but otherwise didn’t hide the knowing smirk.

Bobbie’s left cheek twitched. “Is she always--”

“Yes,” Cotyar answered shortly without letting her finish.

Bobbie fingers curled into fists. There were still a few reflective brain cells working. “How do you protect her if her enemies are her friends and her friends are her enemies?”

Amusement drained out of him. “I just do. Because the alternative is worse.”

The alternative being Avasarala being hurt, gasping in pain, dying somewhere without someone there to make sure that shit never happened in the first place. Bobbie’s chest hurt like pulling multiple Gs.

“Yeah, okay.” She nodded.

“It’s a shit job,” Cotyar grumbled with a sigh. “But someone has to do it.”  He shrugged with a look of exasperated resignation.

Bobbie rolled her eyes. “And that someone might as well be you.”

“She did ask for me personally. And at least I knew what I was getting myself into,” Cotyar snarked pointedly.  He paused, before continuing with a disconcerted frown, “Maybe not about the aliens, that’s new.”

Bobbie snorted a laugh, but in the companionable silence she found she was inordinately annoyed Avasarala made a choice to take Cotyar on even with the unpleasantness of his history with her son. And that Cotyar accepted despite the fact that it was a sore topic with him. They came together by choice in spite of all the reasons not to. Where as she was sort of a happy accident.

Shit, was she…jealous? There weren’t enough functioning brain cells in her brain for this development, not when she was fairly buzzing out of her skin to get naked and get fucked.

“More?” She shook the bottle at Cotyar, and then quickly sat it back down when she realized there was a real chance she would shake all of it out.

Cotyar coughed. “I’m good.”

She waited. And waited. And though it was really only a few seconds, it felt interminable, the lack of action in the silence.

“I brought you a drink,” Bobbie stated slowly just in case he was being particularly dim.

Cotyar gave a dubious smack of his lips to reflect on the quality of said drink, but there was unconcealed laughter crinkling his eyes when he replied, “I was told there would be directions.”

She huffed and began rising to remove her under-armor, growling, “And I was under the impression that forward observers knew how to hit the ground--”

Inside of a single blink, Cotyar leapt from a languid sprawl into a predatory hover, trapping her back into the seat. They weren’t quite touching, but close enough that she could feel the tension and heat of his body stretched out above her, charging the space between them. His indulgent grin was full and wide, but there was a sliver of gleaming intent that had her swallowing almost nervously.

“If there are no directions, I’ll just have to take my time and make sure I get it right, won’t I?”


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let's just...be happy for a little bit, no? ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ Also changed rating to explicit because why the fuck not.

Cotyar reached out and found the clasps and zippers that held Bobbie’s under-armor together. Bobbie strained to make herself pliant, to make it easy for him to strip her out of the armor. She was letting him undress her, but if he hesitated for even a second, she had half a mind to get naked on her own. Whatever he had in mind to ‘take his time and get it right,’ it was unnecessary given the fact that he pretty much aced it the last time.

Cotyar’s hands kept moving, but it took a disorienting moment for Bobbie to realize he wasn’t taking the most expeditious route into her pants. He was peeling off her suit, section by section, and each time running his warm palms over the newly uncovered skin. His touch was one of deliberation as he massaged oxygen back into the starved epidermis. Unnecessary it may be, but he was getting under her skin in more ways than one. Bobbie’s lips thinned with effort to keep impassive and blinked away whatever moisture that gathered at the edge of her vision. But his fingers burrowed into hollows and nerve bundles, pushing her to the edge of burgeoning pain that dissolved into effervescent bubbles of bone melting euphoria.

“You’re a menace,” Bobbie sighed.

Cotyar laughed, rich and low. “Tried out for the UNMC and couldn’t handle the cramp.” His hands halted briefly and his eyes shuttered. “Don’t know how you guys do it,” he murmured softly.

Bobbie swallowed, forcing herself not to look away. There was little in that sentence, but there was a lot she already knew courtesy of being compelled to read in to all things Avasarala. Her son was in the UN Marine Corp. Her hand came over his. “You grow into it. I’d rather die in my armor than out of it.”

Cotyar smiled a little sadly, as if he appreciated her effort but it wasn’t anything he hadn’t heard before. Nevertheless, he took the hand that covered his and brought it up against his cheek, stubble prickling against the thin skin of her inner wrist. He turned his head until his lips pressed into the center of her open palm.  

Bobbie blinked against the unexpected warmth expanding in her chest, her now twice-kissed hand tingling. “Must be an Earther thing,” she muttered a little too blithely, then immediately let lose her fingers and nails against that scruffy jaw she had been eyeing all this time.

Cotyar’s eyes fluttered close and he all but purred, his Adam’s apple vibrating in a frequency was tuned to charging the arc of her spine. She was about to attack the other neglected side of his jaw when his arm shot out and gripped her wrist tight enough to stop her breath. His gaze lifted and her eyes rounded at the simmering darkness there. The tactical side of her was all admonishment at her complacency. Did she think he could be so easily caught when the very danger of who he is was wrapped up in those sharp assessing eyes. He smiled, feral and hypnotic, and her heart pounded like stilled prey.

“Must be,” Cotyar circled back, as if he knew exactly what Bobbie had been referring to, as if he was in the room when Avasarala did what she did.

A niggling sense of guilt sprouted. Here she was trying to get into his pants when it was Avasarala’s rejection that put her here in the first place. But the thought burned on the vine when Cotyar raised that hand to his lips and slowly licked a hot path over where Avasarala’s lips had been. Something complicated rippled and weaved through Bobbie until her entire torso felt twisted tight, but his tongue was now a wet tug on her middle finger. Lips closed over the end of the digit, and his teeth bit into the fleshy tip like an electric promise, a prelude to something more satisfying to come. She hissed impatiently, but didn’t buck into him with a cry until he sucked at that teeth marked bit. He pulled her up out of the chair towards him, one of his knees positioned between hers so he was steady and unyielding when she fell against him. He was still in his clothes while she was already stripped down to her underwear. She was almost glad of it when she rubbed herself against him, momentarily relieved by the abrasion his clothes afforded, especially the rough denim that covered his hard thighs and the obscene bulge between his legs.

Bobbie wanted to get closer though, under the clothes, under the skin—but Cotyar had other ideas. He grasped her arms and set her away from him with a force that knocked her shoulder blades into the wall behind them. His eyes were bright and fevered as he tossed her chair aside with a crash. The clatter jolted loose moment of clarity. All the underground living on Mars and the close quarters of ship tours had her shoulders tensing at the unnecessary noise they were making.

Cotyar set a fisted forearm next to Bobbie’s head with a thud. He chuckled darkly at her frown and rasped into her ear, “She knows what she did.”

Bobbie’s eyes widened. Her hands flattened against the cool wall behind her, the thin barrier that separated them and Avasarala. Cotyar skimmed a finger over the skin beneath her jaw, where he could feel the rush of blood from her heart, which was slamming so hard against her ribs that she wondered if she was going to be sore in more ways than one. His head lolled sideways, his unshaven jaw slowly and carefully scraping against her cheek like she was seconds from bolting. But she held herself still, her breathless pants notwithstanding. He hummed and drew one of her earlobes into the heat of his mouth with a lick. Sharp incisors bit into the flesh, catching and pulling all at once until there was pain spasming down her spine and into her sex. One of her legs curled up outside of his thigh just in time for him to dry thrust against that inflamed center. She whimpered, wanting to rip his clothes off and get him inside her, but unable to move even an inch away from the wall.

“Left you in a bit of a mess, did she?” Cotyar mused, reaching unerringly into her underwear. Every inch of her skin tinted pink with heat, her cheeks were so scalding they were nearly numb. Her entire body was blushing and he didn’t even have his dick out yet. Bobbie was about to snap something back when his fingers glided into the slickness between her legs. She stood on tiptoe, her mouth openly panting, her hips rocking against his fingers, a silent plea for him to go deeper, harder, and faster, anything but the patient, methodical, and agonizing way he was teasing her, idly rubbing like he was polishing delicate silver. She was insensible as he tore down the scrap of soaked underwear and moved her legs to step out of them.

“Cleaning up after her again,” Cotyar sighed, albeit unsteadily, into her left thigh, which somehow or another became hooked on top of his shoulder. Bobbie blinked hazily, hearing the words, but his mouth homed in onto her sex before she could understand them. And then nothing seemed to matter except the way he licked his way into her sensitized flesh. Something in her split open and the sounds spilled out of her like a song. She moaned low as he swirled and mewled high as he nipped. He gazed up at her between her thighs, looking like he’d cracked some code, his eyes gleaming with flints of black.

Bobbie instinctively wanted to back up, but there was no space left behind her.

His mouth was there again, with his fingers. They went in deeper than before. His fingers were pumping and twisting into her wet heat, her thighs slippery with her arousal. His mouth was on that hidden mound of flesh, sucking eagerly until she was crying out incoherently with the need to go over that edge. She vaguely felt him rise, opening her even further for his fingers and she was tilting over when he licked that spot on her hand again and muttered the obvious with a mild, “You know, I think she can hear you.”

And she was gone.


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was kind of all over the place. Also: TV canon, book canon, fic canon, head canon, etc. And then, went on a cutting and re-writing bender and well...sorry :p

It was a sight to behold. Cotyar could chalk it up to the occupational hazard of always looking for that moment of weakness, but he’d like to think that he was appreciating this for what it was. That Bobbie looked as if he took her apart and put her back together again, without the weights of the planets on her shoulders and the lives of her teammates etched in tight lines under her eyes. Just pure distilled Bobbie Draper, strong, loyal, quick on the uptake, and all in all rather delightful. He couldn’t ask for a better teammate for an op. Or, if she was amenable as she was now, a partner for a romp in the sheets.

Figuratively. There were no sheets involved just yet. Just two people having sex against a wall and pretending there wasn’t another person between them. Not that there was that much pretending to be had. He may have gotten Bobbie off, but turning her on, well, Avasarala always knew where people’s buttons were. Though he wasn’t sure if he was helping Bobbie scratch an itch or just making her crush on Avasarala worse by invoking the older woman’s name while going down on her.

No, strike that, he was sure.

It was both.

He could try to dissuade Bobbie from getting in too deep with a few selective anecdotes. God knew there were enough unsavory need-to-know secrets between him and Avasarala that he had been surprised she let him lose after Charanpal. As head over heels as Bobbie was, he could give it a good try.

He could.

But why would he.

The woman was a tank and tanks were obvious deterrents for people looking to cause trouble. The same people that Avasarala tended to attract like flies to honey. The circumstances were also less than ideal. Whatever proto-shitstorm they were in, Avasarala was too much of a figurehead to get out of it unscathed. He was only one man. Bobbie was a godsend. Even if Avasarala resisted, someone who loved her would almost always protect her better than anyone just doing their job. And if that same someone was strong and smart enough to survive both the protomolecule hybrid and Avasarala’s games, he’d have to be a serious idiot to not take advantage.

Not that it didn’t come with its own perks.

He led a loose-limbed Bobbie out of her bra tank and gritted his teeth against that moment of lightheadedness as he took in the full extent of her nudity. Her body was splayed against the wall like a classical painting. Her warm honeyed skin was a starkly erotic contrast against the cool utilitarian gray, beckoning him to touch and caress every lovely inch until he expired from the lack of oxygen. Oh but what a way to go.

And that was all this was, a perk. He was already shit out of luck extricating himself from one woman. Liking someone well enough to have sex with them didn’t have to lead to anything complicated. Not that his brain was in any condition to do a deep dive into anything that required logic when his dick was being so insistent about executing that particular maneuver for him.

But Bobbie’s newly uncovered curves were an irresistible temptation for someone as tactile as him. Cotyar half circled a dusky areola with his thumb, the sharp edge of his nail pressing into the side of a dark nipple. Bobbie hissed, then gasped with a high whimper as he alternated, brushing the hard knuckle of his index finger under the flushed knot of flesh. She writhed against his repeated ministrations to explore the different textures of smooth and puckered. Her breathless pants grew louder until he couldn’t tell whether it was her or his heart pounding in his ears. Finally, she reached up behind his neck, but finding no purchase in his close cut hair she dug in. Her trimmed but stinging nails raked at the back of his head until he acquiesced, ducking down and placing a lifting hand beneath the soft curve of her breast before capturing a tight nipple into the heated suction of his mouth. With this other hand he flattened his hand over the peaking bud of her other breast, letting it roll and catch under the center of his palm.

The pull and push had Bobbie arching off the wall, bucking shakily against him and making a frustrated whine before blurting out a curse.

“Fuck!  Take off your clothes, now!” Bobbie ordered, her voice a husky growl. Her hands gripped a handful of his shirt.

Cotyar had to straighten or be strangled by the collar of his shirt. “Now you’re giving me directions?” he asked dryly.

“And you’ll follow them if you want to wear that shirt or those pants again,” she casually threatened with a flash of teeth, possibly meant to convey her willingness to rip said shirt and pants off with said teeth.

“She wouldn’t appreciate it if I showed up to work in my underwear,” he replied, shaking his head at her.

Bobbie’s eyes raked him up and down. When her roving gaze caught his, she smiled with such feminine mystique that his throat suddenly felt caught in a vice. “I wouldn’t be too sure about that.”

Cotyar covered the heat in his cheeks by lifting the shirt more slowly than necessary over his head. He sucked in a quick breath when probing fingers touched his most recently healed injury, given to him by Mao’s goons. Bobbie glanced down, tracing over the scar before looking back up with a question in her concerned eyes.

He pinned her with a look. “It’s a bit late to worry about that now, isn’t it?”

Bobbie had the grace to look abashed.

“Don’t worry, I’m more than up to the task,” Cotyar relented, smirking.

He covered her fingers with his own and pressed into the scarred area, letting her see for herself that the injury had healed. After that, Bobbie didn’t need additional encouragement to explore the broad planes of his naked chest.

“Why do you keep them?” she asked, stilted, fingers brushing against barely-there scars, fainter than the fresh one, but visible if one was close enough to see.

Cotyar shrugged. “A reminder of mistakes.”

“It’s a wonder you’re not covered with them,” she remarked without bite.

“There are more in places you can’t see.” He mirrored her tone before brushing a lock of hair out of her eyes, adding quietly, “They remind me to do better, they’re not albatrosses.”

Bobbie stared, her fingers curling back into the palms of her hands.

A frown built across his brow. “Do you have albatrosses on Mars?”

Bobbie narrowed her eyes.

“There’s a saying on Earth, with albatrosses…” he began to explain.

Bobbie abruptly grabbed both of his shoulders and squeezed, pulling at him until they were chest to naked chest, roaring, “We have that saying too!”

He slid a hand down her back, coming to a rest on the curve of her ass as he rocked into her, homing into the wet heat through his jeans. He chuckled a little wobbly, muttering, “It’s a sea bird so I wasn’t--”

Bobbie, with a knee drawn up to his hip, met his thrust with a snap, “Shut up and fuck me, you little shit.”

He grinned at that rude endearment. He chose to think it was due to something similar about the temperament of the women in his life rather than something about him. After all, there was nothing particularly little about him, was there?

Impatient, Bobbie reached down between them and grabbed at the zipper of his fly. Cotyar closed his eyes and tried unsuccessfully to breathe through his nose. When her hand slid in and she finally touched him, he grunted and slammed a steadying hand on the wall next to her head. Bobbie didn’t so much as flinch, but instead seemed concentrated on the hot hard length in her hand, making several passes up and down the root and tip. Her dark eyes were glazed, her breath coming out in short gaps. She had to be thinking about how it would feel inside her, filling her, driving in and out of her slippery sex.

Cotyar groaned deep in his throat, unable to stop the unthinking thrusting of his hips into the moving grip of her hand. He would have to stop her soon, lest he spent himself in her hand when he had the opportunity to ensure that they both enjoyed the mechanics of casual, non-complicated sex.

His brain, as impeded as it was by the elemental drive, was slow to catch up to the meaning of the small blinking light at the corner of his eye. But it caught up just in time. Cotyar bit down, his jaw flexing as he leaned his forehead against Bobbie’s and pulled her hand out from his boxers.

When he made no move to undress the rest of himself, Bobbie blinked in confusion, long lashes aflutter. “Why, why are we stopping?” He wanted to ask himself the same question. Unfortunately, he also knew the answer.

“Bobbie, may I call you Bobbie?” he asked, a calm and perfectly stated question despite the uncomfortably prominent erection that still demanded release.

Bobbie stared at him with a twitch of her lips. “You had your tongue up in me. I’ll allow it,” she proclaimed.

“Well, Bobbie, that light right there,” Cotyar said, pointing at the blinking light on his hand terminal, “is…” He frowned with consternation, “Something I need to look at right now.” Taking a deep breath, he heaved himself away from her.

“What. What are you doing?”

Cotyar took another chest expanding breath and zipped up as much as he could. “Disappointingly enough, my job.”

“How can you even think with that?” she asked pointedly at his crotch.

“Training,” he replied flatly. With a cautious first step, he began moving gingerly toward the table where his hand terminal still blinked.

Cotyar could still feel Bobbie’s eyes at his back and he was not at all startled when there was a hiccup and then laughter as it bubbled out of her.

“I’m glad you find this funny,” he sighed, sitting down just as carefully.

“I was just wondering if that’s how you’re going to move when we’re both old and gray,” she managed between more bouts of laughter.

He blinked in surprise and sent a questioning look her way. “When we’re both old and gray?”

Bobbie reared back, her mouth gaping. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

Cotyar considered her for a long beat, long enough that she was starting to squirm under his stare. “How disappointing,” he murmured.

The rest of her nude body flushed pink. He pinched the bridge of his nose.

“You’re giving me too much credit, Bobbie.”

“What?”

“Could you, put some clothes on, please?” he pleaded, rubbing a hand down his face.

“Oh.” Bobbie hurriedly glanced around and grabbed the nearest and largest piece of clothing. It was his shirt.

He grimaced. “That’s not better. It’s differently worse.”

“Look, I’m not interfering,” she said, shooing with her hands as if telling him to look away while she searched for the smaller pieces of her underwear, “If you can’t do your job, how is that my fault?”

Cotyar quickly mulled this over and replied, nodding, “Fair.” He took another centering breath and once he was able to disregard the discomfort in the region of his crotch as a biological nuisance, he read the details of the blinking indicator. There were two messages coming from the secret relay station he employed.

“One’s for you,” he swiped it over to her without opening the message.

Bobbie, having found her clothing, picked up her hand terminal and gave it a quick glance before scrutinizing him with an odd expression.

Cotyar found that too difficult to ignore. He turned away from his own message and gestured impatiently. “What? Does it say something weird?”

“I don’t know what it says yet. It’s from the Hillmans.”

“So? Read or watch it and see how it could concern us.”

“It’s from Mars. You don’t want to read it first?”

Cotyar flattened his mouth and leaned toward Bobbie. “You threatened to go through me like a door if I burned you and yours.”

Bobbie nodded.

“Is Chrisjen Avasarala yours?” he asked solemnly.

“Yes,” she answered without a second thought.

He smiled over her rapid response, warmth expanding over his chest. “All guesswork stopped the moment you threatened me over her. Stop second-guessing. I don’t have the time or the inclination. Got it, marine?”

“Got it, spy,” she acknowledged soberly before returning to her hand terminal.

Cotyar read his missive from Larson, his contact on the UNN Agatha King. When he finished the message, he found his fists balled up in anger even when the news was predictable. He glanced over at Bobbie, her eyes wide with excitement. She had good news then.

“Okay, bad news first. My vacation’s over. Errinwright just dropped the other shoe.”


	17. Chapter 17

Avasarala had her eyes closed, but beyond them her mind was racing, trying to put the pieces where they should go. Souther. Errinwright. Nguyen. Something humiliating for bobblehead if there was anything left over, for allowing Errinwright to wreak havoc while she was off planet.

She started when a loud thump struck against the wall between Cotyar’s quarters and hers. Then came the sound of furniture being loudly displaced. Noise was an anathema to the spy trade unless it was meant to be heard.

She growled a warning that in hindsight was perhaps too much of a dare, even if Cotyar couldn’t hear it, “You wouldn’t.”

She was answered by a deliberate thud behind the wall, a knock on her presuppositions, giving way to the increasingly precarious sensibilities of her spy. He would, he really would. Particularly after she berated him like one of her milquetoast administrative assistants out of central casting. She was almost glad for his fit of pique because she wouldn’t be able to stand his indifference if it came to that. For all the things she could have done that would have pissed him off for good, it wasn’t even the worst. The worst was living up to the ‘snake in a sari’ epithet. The worst was how she kept the forged debt her back pocket, marked just-in-case-of-emergency. 

Avasarala shivered, feeling her blood run cold. The more she didn’t want to think about it, the more she thought about it. Fine. This was a fucking fine time for her conscience to rear its shitty little head. She chuckled humorlessly. If not now, when?

_A clean tissue waved in front of her._

Avasarala took it and glanced sideways at just one of the many men in military dress uniform for her son’s wedding. He had the same bearing and fitness as the marines, but there was something extra non-descript about him, that even she, the person who remembered people and their weaknesses for a living, took longer than she liked to place him.

Avasarala covered by dabbing at the corners of her still misty eyes and sniffed daintily. “You must think I’m a silly old woman.”

The young man clasped his hands together and leaned out on his forearms, overlooking the balcony at the wedding reception below. He spoke to the open air in front of him, “You’re neither foolish nor geriatric. But if you must be sentimental, this would be the perfect time to do it.”

Avasarala stilled before rolling the tissue into a tiny little ball. Pivoting her entire body, she turned consider her son’s friend and groomsman.

“Good thing they actually worked out,” he said obliquely, though breaking into a jovial smile when he spotted the happy couple making the rounds below. “When it works, it works.” He turned about to face her as well, his expression fading into an enigma of blandness. “Except it’s not always going to work.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she replied just as blandly, promising nothing.

He shrugged. “Good talk?”

There was only so much empty posturing she could take. She had been practically giddy with the culmination her subtle matchmaking and manipulated serendipity. Who was this brazen youth to besmirch how she followed through on such good instincts? Her tongue grew thick with direct cuts of expletives, but it was her son’s wedding day so for his sake, she could rein it in a bit. Didn’t mean she couldn’t say what she wanted. And more.

“I’ve had better, honestly,” Avasarala demurred haughtily.  

His eyes went half-mast as the corners of his mouth quirked. It struck her as having awoken something that had been dormant, lying in wait for the satisfaction of seeing her strike out.

“Well,” he started, his voice lowered to impart an impolite truth, “You have been around longer.”

Avasarala’s eyes widened a fraction before they shuttered over the tips of his boots. As her eyes lifted, they whispered over the hard lines of his silhouette with a scalpel’s edge until they pierced his oddly anticipating gaze.

“Staff Sergeant Cotyar Ghazi of SIGINT, is it?” Avasarala sing-songed with a punctuated tisk at the end, smiling sharply.

The quirked lips split into a full mouthed grin, flashing her two rows of pearly whites. “Ma’am, I can assure you I’m still entirely too small fry to warrant that smile, but,” he paused, scratching a thumbnail over a corner of his bottom lip as he peered through veiled but unflinching eyes, “I’ll work on it.”

Avasarala blinked, her face felt warm. It wasn’t as if no one’s ever tried to flirt with her or insinuate themselves into her pants. Nor was she a stranger to sycophants and star-eyed acolytes. Only this young man felt strangely companionable with his stark assessments and calculated observations. At least, he was well on his way to give as good as he got.

“Oh, and the bride requested your presence,” Cotyar added as an afterthought.

“You could have started with that,” Avasarala bristled. This was still an important day for her son, whether she had designed it or not.

“Well, since traveling back in time is a non-starter, I guess I’ll just have to make nice?”

Nice came in the form of an offered arm to escort her down to the festivities. Without a glance back at him, Avasarala primly took the arm and proceeded to dig in with her nails. The bicep she encountered was so hard the effort made her teeth gnash. But from the rude curl of his lips, she might as well have been massaging his balls.

“You’re nothing like my son,” she bit through a plastic smile as they waded into the crowd of imbibing wedding guests.

“You’re nothing like my mother,” he readily supplied.

“Your mother’s dead.”

“I know!” he replied, unsurprised at her knowledge. His unoccupied arm and hand was extended in the manner of ‘shit happens, what can you do?’

“You must have been exhausting as a child.”

“And now I’ve got even more stamina as an adult,” he added with mock apologies and a twinkle in his eye.

Her cheeks were definitely heating. She had overindulged.

“Little shit,” Avasarala muttered.

“Little?”

Cotyar placed a level hand over his head, then lowered it significantly to the top of hers. She batted his hand away as one would an obnoxious insect. He chuckled with entirely too much exuberance.

Out of the corner of her eyes, a cohort of Charanpal’s unit stared roundly and silently at them as they passed by.

“Ordered and delivered, as requested,” Cotyar exclaimed with good humor, bowing with exaggerated obsequiousness at the newlyweds.

Avasarala rolled her eyes with her entire head as he noiselessly backed away from her and the family before disappearing into the crush.

“Ma, no bloodletting today. He’s a really good friend,” Charanpal implored.

“Given what he was willing to say, I’d say he’s your best friend,” Avasarala replied, deceptively soft.

Charanpal’s face went flat like the press of his uniform. For a split second, Avasarala wished she didn’t push him into this work. But she quickly flashed a mother’s smile and patted a soothing hand over his chest, somehow broader and higher than she remembered. His shoulders relaxed, however minutely, a mother could tell. So she turned and clutched at the hand of his bride.

“How can I help?”

Cotyar didn’t return to her attentions again until much later. By then she’d noted the lack of movement in his rise through the ranks. In contrast with Charanpal, whose last name all but guaranteed at the very least an upward trend. By all accounts, Cotyar served exceptionally well on his assignments. However, he tended to make judgments in shorthand, too quick for some. She found herself rather sympathetic at that point. It was enough to get him into her office one afternoon.

Cotyar leaned against the armrest of her couch, arms crossed. “I’m on leave.”

“Ah, yes, mandatory off time. How would you like to do something that’s more substantial than getting your cock sucked?”

He scratched his five o’clock shadow, looking away from her. “That wasn’t all that I was planning to do,” he grumbled before hedging, “Don’t you have your own people for this?”

“This one’s a little more off the books.”

“I’m not sure why you think I’d do this for you--” He glanced at the dossier she swiped into his hand terminal and raised an intrigued eyebrow. “Okay, I’ll do it. But this seems a little out of your purview.”

“I liked being a creditor. You never know when you may be in a situation to collect.”

“Great, and here I thought you were just doing something nice,” he replied dryly.

Avasarala let her gaze slice through him. “What’s necessary is almost never anything fucking nice,” she snapped, unexpected anger roiling in her chest.

Those ready-quip lips thinned. His expression turned pensive. She was unreasonably gratified when he responded without the condescension or the pity one often found from the arrogance of youth.

“Yeah.”

She looked out her window, the skies a clear glorious blue.

He broke the silence, waving the hand terminal, eyes crinkling. “This one though, it’s nice. Don’t worry, I won’t out you.” And he was almost out the door when he came back, hands splayed over her desk. “I know when I’m being manipulated.”

Avasarala kept reading the holo display she’d been viewing. “I wasn’t going for subtle.”

He let out a bark of laughter before leaving with a jaunty stride. A tiny smile tugged across her face.

Cotyar completed the mission with aplomb and there was always another waiting on his hand terminal timed to his mandatory vacations. They were more often than not, cleanups from messes other people made in their haste or stupidity. And whether these missions had anything to do with the restart of his trajectory in rank, Avasarala couldn’t say with a hundred percent certainty, but it wasn’t long before Cotyar and Charanpal were shipping out on the same assignments.

_Then came the shittiest time of her life._

And Avasarala being who she was, she took advantage of it, of her son’s death, so of course it was the worst by any normal definition. She balled up her hands into fists and exhaled a trembling breath.

The worst, the worst was not telling Cotyar that his faulty intel had come too late to matter, UN Command had already sent Charanpal’s unit into the fight on Callisto. He hadn’t seen through the sociopathic degree of ass-covering by the professional bureaucrats like she had. And she had been too steeped in grief and self-recrimination. By the time she’d thought to clear the matter, he’d fucked off completely from the UN, disappearing from her sight. For someone who no longer wanted to tow the company line, his guilt was her only sure-fire bargaining chip, one that she could cash in without terms or conditions if she ever got backed into a corner. So she let him lose, knowing that single line was enough to him to reel him back in.

So in the grand scheme of things, be it personal, professional, and alien, this, whatever this was, should barely register.

This was not going to derail her.

This was the least of her problems.

This was Cotyar picking the stupidest time to be an asshole.

This was the strained whimper of a distinctly female voice. Avasarala shifted restlessly in her seat. Though muted by the barrier between them, she had no trouble identifying the woman or the type of activity that would have instigated the sound.

Avasarala narrowed her eyes at the bulkhead. She was well aware of the trajectories she had set in place. The advancement of such a path was inconsequential but for the resulting destination and the opportunities it afforded. At least, that was the idea. The pointed clamor next door, however, called upon her to pay attention to every salacious burn and thrust of this particular outing.

_Thump. Come. Crash. Come. Thud. Come see in your mind’s eye the dance you’ve orchestrated. The naked thighs that you’ve made wet with arousal, grasping for leverage against pistoning hips. The thick cock that you’ve made hard, straining for release inside a wet heat. See how I’ve braced her deliberately upon the altar of our adjoining walls? And because I’m a little shit so of course I’ve told her that you can hear her. So when I lick a stiff nipple with my clever tongue, she moans a little deeper, when I rub my dexterous thumb against that tight bundle of nerves, she whimpers a little higher, and when I drive my heavy cock into the snug walls of her sex, she cries out a little louder, just for you._

Fuck. Fuck him. Fuck her.

Avasarala bit down her lower lip, gripping the edge of her desk with white knuckles. Beads of sweat gathered at her temples, more trickling down between the valley of her breasts. She drew her legs together, thighs pressing together against her throbbing hollow center. But with each breathless sound from next door, the vicious bite of want only grew, pain and pleasure grazing like sharp teeth against the flushed surface of her overheated skin. Her nipples were straining against her breasts, puckered so tight and hard that they might as well have their own gravity.

Oh, fuck it.

Avasarala could hear the rasp of Cotyar’s low laughter between her ears, and all it did was make her squirm harder. With a trembling hand, she unzipped, exposing the fabrics made of silk and lace in rich amethyst, underthings every bit as delicate and luxurious as what she wore on the outside, completing her armor. She hissed as she reached into a bra cup, rolling and pinching that painfully aching nub of flesh. Her hips bucked into the press of her other hand as she drew down to touch herself.

She had been biting her lip, but her lungs felt squeezed too tight and her mouth fell open to pant for air. Her brain was fuzzy, reality leaking out like it too much for her skull. Were the pumping fingers in her sex hers, Bobbie’s, or Cotyar’s? She wasn’t sure who was making those desperate, keening sounds, her or Bobbie. She had no idea where the vision of smooth limbs and hard muscles, careening against each other in stop-jerk motions, came from, but she could feel herself becoming slick.

When it finally registered that the sounds had turned into murmurings of talk, her entire body tensed, and a ridiculous, indignant thought pierced through the haze. They were done and she wasn’t, what the fuck.

“We have that saying too!” Came Bobbie’s yell.

That Avasarala heard, loud and clear. Without additional context it was good as gibberish. Another thump followed and she just hoped to hell that if they were going to fight, they should keep in mind that they were still heading into a possible protomolecule warzone.

In the meantime. Avasarala sighed, her fingers slowing as the burn of lust petered. Fine, she would just take her own sweet time then.

She was nearly there, a pleasant heat cresting when the knock came.

Seriously?

Avasarala scowled, her mouth firming into a pout as another knock sounded. She closed her eyes and schooled her breath to less pounding pace.

“Hey, all right in there?” Cotyar asked, tapping lightly.

“Chrisjen?” Bobbie called out.

It was the threads of worry in their voices that made it impossible for her to hold them back much longer. Besides, Cotyar wasn’t going to let a flimsy door hatch block his way and Bobbie would just as soon rip it off its hinges.

Avasarala got up, her hand dropping to pull up the zipper. She stopped, looking down at herself. There were inevitable wrinkles that every woman her age couldn’t escape, but she kept herself in good shape and the bra expensive in a way that was both flashy and well built for support. Diaphanous lace hugged the gentle swell of her breasts. Strips of jewel toned purple silk stretched across the center of each cup, gleaming softly as she subtly pulled her shoulders back.

Her hand dropped to her side. Avasarala sat back down, thighs pressing tight as she crossed her legs, her lips drawn up in an enigmatic smile.

“Come in.”


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This went a little sideways, not according to plan. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

His gun had been out the moment the second knock on Avasarala’s door came and went unanswered. He wasn’t going to put it away now.

“I’ll clear the room. Wait on my signal and take point at her position,” Cotyar stated flatly as he gestured for Bobbie to open the hatch.

“Trouble?” Bobbie rolled her shoulders before putting her hand on the handle.

“With her?” he smiled grimly, “I’m always expecting trouble.” He nodded and they took to their positions with trusted ease and drilled muscle memory. He entered as Bobbie released the hatch, gun in hand and eyes sweeping the corners before quickly assessing Avasarala, seated at the desk, for missing limbs and bodily injury. Upon seeing nothing life threatening that warranted immediate attention, he signaled Bobbie to enter with a wave of his open palm before sliding off, keeping his back to the wall as he circled the room.

Avasarala harrumphed, “There’s no one else here. I was…busy.”

Cotyar ignored her, poking his head into the head while Bobbie slipped in to stand in front of her, facing out, relegating the older woman to the corner with both their backs to the wall. It gave him a bit of room to breathe, knowing that if by chance there was someone or something lurking, they’d have to go through Bobbie to get to Avasarala.

Once he was satisfied that the room was clear, Cotyar found himself gripping the gun too tightly to make any decent use of it. The sum of a strange ship, strange people, and a boss who had a habit of making it damn difficult for him to keep her alive ultimately equaled to a bit of jumpiness on his part. That was fine.

Cotyar tucked the gun back into the waistband behind him, fingers stretching flat to alleviate the coiled stiffness in them. A vein near his left temple pounded as he endeavored to remember the reason he and Bobbie came to Avasarala in the first place. His gaze landed back on Avasarala and then it wasn’t just his head that was throbbing. Considering the amount of abuse he had foisted upon it, there was a bit of relief that his dick was still reacting with startling alacrity. Even if it was the proverbial last straw. Surging waves of hot anger, gnawing frustration, and hopeless want propelled him into a sea of seeing red. It all crashed into him, knocking the all the sensible winds out of him, upending him into the maelstrom. He seemed to have blanked out for a second because the next thing he knew, Bobbie had an immobilizing grip on his arm, fingers biting into muscle.

With her back still to Avasarala, Bobbie asked softly with dry deference, “Should I just zip her all the way down?” As if a word or nod from him and she would turn around and finish what Avasarala started with her little strip tease. To open her up and spread her out for the both of them like some decadent feast to be devoured. Palms and fingers to peel away the intricate purples that encased the swell of her breasts. Tongues and teeth to savor the expanse of her newly exposed skin. Mouths and lips to suck the haughty, stubborn taste of her into wanton desperation.

Cotyar inhaled sharply, his mouth dry and his heart pounding. He wanted to say yes and let consequences and ledgers be damned. He had to force oxygen back into his brain and reset, so that he could think and analyze the situation. These thoughts weren’t exactly new, but their sudden clarity and blistering intensity was a problem in his head and apparently in his pants. Again, it shouldn’t be new to him, how Avasarala spelled trouble even when her life wasn’t in mortal danger. How exactly could he be expected to stay calm and cool and do his fucking job when the most important person in his life kept stirring the caldron?

The grip on his arm showed no signs of letting up and for once he was glad of the restraint. He pushed, and Avasarala pushed back harder. He knew this, why was he even surprised? Bobbie had stopped him before he barreled down a path of no return. Good on her. Who ever thought the Martian marine was going to be the levelheaded one in this situation?

Cotyar blinked and exhaled an even breath. Avasarala was either making a point that she could have done without the explicit soundtrack of their activity next door--even if she all but ensured it would happen in the first place--or she had decided to show him she intended to be more receptive to a certain marine’s amorous intentions.

Either way, he decided he just didn’t care beyond the mission anymore. That it wasn’t jealousy or the greediness for Avasarala’s all consuming attention that was making the sour taste in his mouth. Ultimately it made no difference whether Avasarala had changed her mind about Bobbie. As long as Bobbie could put her whole heart into protecting Avasarala, it was mission accomplished for him.

There was nothing more for him here aside from a job. Whatever infinitesimal and ridiculous possibilities there could have been between him and Avasarala, they died with Charanpal. That was the tacit understanding that he etched into his ribs, an incantation to keep that traitorous muscle in the center of his chest caged and stunted. He was close to hating himself for allowing it to escape for that flash of a second, when Avasarala must have only acted on whatever whims or wins she was after.

Feeling sufficiently steeped in cynicism, he pushed Bobbie’s hand away with a weary sigh. She let him, but watched carefully as he moved behind Avasarala and he couldn’t help but adore her for it. He reached over Avasarala’s shoulder and down to hold the pull tab between his fingers. He paused there, unknowingly creating a new set of realities in the multiverse.

In many of the newly spawned universes, the zipper slid further down until he could reach in between her thighs, to the source where the scent of her arousal had short-circuited the signals from his brain and let his animal instincts into the driver’s seat. His fingers glided in, the walls of her sex a slippery and receptive heat. He rubbed until her legs fell open, hips bucking against his hand and into Bobbie’s fevered gaze. He rubbed until she was squirming and panting into Bobbie’s mouth. He rubbed until she came apart with his hand between her legs and Bobbie’s tongue over the peak of her breast.

There were some universes where he simply abandoned the utilitarian metal tab and reached right into the far more intriguing, exposed v of soft skin, his fingers skimming feathery light across the swell of lace clad curves. He kissed the smoothed line of her bared shoulder as he released the clasp of her bra and watched as her breasts spill into Bobbie’s waiting hands. He kissed the shell of her right ear and growled his shameless appreciation for how desperate she sounded for Bobbie to take that darkly flushed nipple into her mouth. He kissed her right temple, damp with salty afterglow, and admired Bobbie’s work below--open skin brazenly adorned with indented reds where teeth had grazed and puckered pinks where mouth had sucked.

In one universe, the origin of the many, the loud click and close of the zipper’s teeth echoed in the silence of tautly held breaths.

Halfway up, Cotyar murmured from a clandestine but professional distance, “Don’t start anything you can’t finish. You hate cleaning up.”

Avasarala narrowed her eyes at him, the heat of her glare was laughably and heart-achingly familiar.

When the zipper was fully closed beneath her chin, he stood up straight and announced with a halfhearted grin, “Vacation’s over. Time to get back to work.”


	19. Chapter 19

Work?

Bobbie blinked. She might not be the wiliest one here but even she could see that the current circumstances were not conducive for anything she would ever presume to call ‘work.’ From the warm glow of Avasarala’s flush to the flickering embers of heat behind Cotyar’s heavy-lidded gaze, the air was thick with combustible potential.

“Your Mars gambit paid off,” Cotyar continued, all business, doing his best to douse the flames before they ignited.

Bobbie sighed inaudibly. Guess that was why he was running the op. A bit of an asshole in the sheets, but a cool operator in the streets.

Avasarala swiveled pointedly away from Cotyar and nailed Bobbie in place with a raised eyebrow and a small pleased smile, as it was a secret victory between the two of them.

“Um, right,” Bobbie managed, pulling her lips down into a firm line, trying not to feed that already bottomless ego. “The Hillmans are all in and they brought the big guns.”

She flipped the message into a holo display. A blonde with icy blue eyes spoke.

“The MCRN has launched an internal investigation into the Ganymede incident with Project Caliban. They are also dispatching an investigatory unit with two destroyers on maximum burn to rendezvous with you at Io. Given the circumstances and upon my recommendation to Fleet Command, they have decided to forgo impartiality. You have been provided with a temporary MCRN SIGINT consultant status. XO of the MCRN Telesilla is Commander Michelle Yao, sister to Captain Teresa Yao and the captain of the MCRN Wu Zetian is Brian Hillman, Tevy’s uncle. I hope this will answer any questions regarding the trustworthiness of myself and the people heading your way.”

The woman leaned forward, her lips drawing flat before she spoke again.

“Sergeant Draper, I don’t wish to expound needlessly. My husband wished to impart his wish for you to bring the people responsible for all of this, for Tevy’s death, back for trial. Rest assured I have no such compulsion. You can either bring me their names and heads will roll, or you can bring me news of their demise and I will gladly shake your hand.”

Hilly’s mother paused. Her eyes closed tight and her jaw clenched, drawing lines that read of grief and spoke of anger. When she looked up again, that piercing gaze was so reminiscent of Hilly that despite knowing what was coming in the message, Bobbie quickly blinked away the moisture gathering beneath her eyes.

“As she would say, good hunting.”

The message terminated.

Avasarala hummed appreciatively, “I like her.”

“Of course you do,” Cotyar muttered. “Under ordinary circumstances, it’s your head she would be after.”

“But these are hardly ordinary circumstances, are they?” Avasarala replied, still not looking at him.

“No, they aren’t,” he answered flatly, “So you should keep all your options open.”

“Some things aren’t up for discussion,” Avasarala shot back.

Cotyar smiled, a stiff pull of the lips. “Weren’t they just?”

They were fighting in code again. Bobbie wandered back to the message from Director Hillman. The details were sinking in the second time around.

“SIGINT…” Bobbie’s cheek twitched.

They abruptly stopped shooting daggers at each other and faced her. Avasarala smiled serenely. Cotyar chuckled lowly.

“Welcome to the network. I always knew you had it in you,” he teased before his gaze slide sideways to Avasarala. “You planted the idea with the Hillmans.”

It wasn’t a question.

“Of course I did. It’d be a long wait for the Martians to get their thick heads out of their obstinate asses on their own,” Avasarala proclaimed, before adding soothingly, “No offense, Bobbie.”

“Does it even matter if I’m still offended?” Bobbie asked sardonically before drawing up straight, blinking. “Wait, why is involving SIGINT important?”

“Other than being deliciously ironic for the marine who looks down on us spy folk?” Cotyar asked, smirking that know-it-all smirk.

Bobbie growled through set teeth, “Yes.”

Cotyar raised his eyebrows at Avasarala. She merely placed a neat hand under her jaw, above that not-so-innocent curve of her dark lips. He rolled his eyes, and turned back to Bobbie with a long suffering sigh. He was entirely ready to provide the explanation she wanted, all without a word of clarification passing through them. Bobbie wondered, not for the first time, if Cotyar and Avasarala bickered to pass the time because they already knew what the other one was thinking.

“SIGINT is important because after all this blows over, if Mars wants to save face and say they had a hand in bringing Mao and his co-conspirators to justice, all SIGINT has to do is say your defection was the plan all along. Other than a few people in the know, to all the other grunts, you’re going to be the self sacrificing hero who put Mars above her own reputation. They’re all going to beat themselves up for ever thinking you were a defector and prostrate at your feet for forgiveness.”

At her nauseated look of astonishment, Cotyar ended his spiel with mouthy grin, “You’ll love it.”

“That’s crazy,” Bobbie exclaimed wide-eyed.

Avasarala lifted her chin and stated with no small amount of arrogance, “That’s politics.”

Bobbie’s head hurt. Her hands were starting to look unlike her own. The reality she had always known was bending under the gravity of these two conniving assholes. And she had never been so ready to shove both of them up the wall and screw them senseless. She wanted to bite into the flushed pout of their lower lips and claw through their dark hairlines with a grip so she could watch their sharp, calculating pupils blow wide with elemental lust. She wanted to feel beneath her palm their sedate, manipulative hearts thundering uncontrollably as her fingers curled around his hard cock and curved into her slick sex. She wanted to ride them and fuck them in a punishing pace until the only sounds out of their smirking, scheming mouths were desperate gasps and ecstatic moans.

And if she needed a break, the idea of watching Cotyar lose his perennial cool while fucking Avasarala to pleasured speechlessness was oddly satisfying. The uncivilized sounds they would make, throaty groans and keening whimpers. The filthy things they would do to one up each other because they had an audience and someone had to be in charge of the show. Someone would glare at her with hazy half-lidded eyes, just a tad resentful that Bobbie was making them into mindless fucking animals at the mercy of their sexual attraction and that other stuff. And won’t she come back and join them now because this was all her fault and they intended to punish her for it.

Bobbie was hot and achy just imagining it. Apparently this was a thing for her now. Huh.

“Speaking of politics,” Cotyar continued determinedly, unaware of the roles he was playing in Bobbie’s libidinous daydreams, “I hope your ducks are in a row because Errinwright just screwed us, again.”

He flipped open a holo from his terminal. A young woman with the name of Larson spoke into the recording.

“I was able to intercept communications from Errinwright to Nguyen, copied to all of UN Command. It said to bring Avasarala in for questioning regarding evidence of unsanctioned communication with Fred Johnson. She is also under suspicion of a quid pro quo agreement for death of an OPA Black Sky operative in exchange for the UN nuclear warheads lost during the Eros incident. ”

Avasarala betray Earth? “That’s bullshit,” Bobbie exclaimed.

Cotyar paused the message.

The Earthers were looking everywhere but at her.

“I thought you said she was read in,” Avasarala murmured.

Cotyar huffed and replied with heavy sarcasm, “I’m sorry for not leaving treasonous communications on the record.”

At Bobbie’s confused frown, Avasarala helpfully explained, “Only the first half is true.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Cotyar said airily, “Everyone knows you have a bone to pick with Black Sky and the order is evenhanded enough to make it believable. The evidence he has on you talking to Fred Johnson fits his story.”

“Yes, yes, as you said, the OPA leaks like a sieve,” Avasarala mimicked mockingly. “Errinwright kept that in his back pocket. That motherfucker.”

“You could have been in big trouble,” Cotyar admonished. Avasarala waved away his concern.

Bobbie’s frowned deepened. Back on the _Guanshiyin_ , the UN escort ship had been bearing down on them to get Avasarala back to ‘safety’ but after their non-response to the hails during gunfight, that was not a chance they were going to take. After making Theo release the communications lock, Avasarala broadcasted wide some nonsense about tracking down Mao. They skedaddled with a recording of Errinwright’s tirade on the _Razorback_ before whoever was in Errinwright’s pocket on the escort ship could convinced the crew to fire on an unarmed civilian vessel carrying the UN deputy undersecretary. It was Cotyar’s dire condition under the Gs they were pulling and the possible pursuit of the UN escort ship that forced them to reach out to Mars. They were damn lucky it was Holden’s crew that answered.

Bobbie had assumed that Avasarala sent the recording back to Earth and they were just sitting tight to make sure all the pieces were in place to capture Mao and Errinwright in one shot. How could a traitor issue an order to all of UN Command? And why were they being so nonchalant?

There was something she wasn’t getting but she couldn’t help asking, “We have evidence of Errinwright colluding with Mao. Why didn’t you send it back to Earth?”

“Because it’s not the treason that matters, it’s the cover up,” Avasarala answered obliquely.

Bobbie took deep, calming breath, before stating dully, “I don’t understand.”

Avasarala gestured for her to wait. “There was more, wasn’t there?” she asked Cotyar, smiling slyly.

“Yes,” Cotyar bit off as he restarted the holo.

Larson resumed speaking in that clinical monotone.

“The other message from Errinwright was sent to Nguyen and a need-to-know distribution list. If Avasarala was caught by UN forces not in the know, they would need to utilize their authority to take command.”

Larson paused, her formerly placid demeanor dissolving, the delicate features of her face turning to a disgusted grimace.

“These dipshits would make sure Chrisjen wouldn’t be making it back to Earth for questioning. You know what, Cotyar, fuck you! When you told me there was some conspiracy going on and you needed my help, you could have told me they were trying to pin all this shit on Chrisjen and then try to kill her. There are quicker and easier ways to get rid of these motherfuckers without risking her neck. You better bring her back in one piece or I swear, I’ll fucking k--”

Cotyar swiped the holo away to cut off Larson’s profanity laced threats with a heave of exasperation.

Avasarala covered up a low chuckle by clearing her throat. She schooled her features into a serious manner, her eyes sobering before asking Cotyar, “The distribution list?”

“It’s not short,” he answered somberly. “You sure Souther can corral this mess without getting a shot off?”

“If anyone can do it, it’s him.” Avasarala turned to Bobbie with an impish smile. “Errinwright and all his allies involved in a conspiracy to kill me to cover up his collusion with Mao. That’s self-evident guilt of conspiracy and murder. No amount of politicking can make that go away. And anything he claimed I did can be explained away as fruit of the poisonous tree. Even my communication with Fred Johnson pales in comparison to that treasonous piece of shit, I’ll get a slap on the wrist at most. I held off so he plays all his cards, and now I can clean the whole fucking house. Do you see it now?”

Bobbie blinked quietly under Avasarala’s expectant scrutiny. “Who’s Larson?” she asked finally, breaking her silence, “She’s not your kid and or a relative. And she’s not just some random spy you planted with Nguyen.”

Avasarala stopped short at the admittedly non sequitur, looking helplessly at Cotyar to pick up Bobbie’s train of thought.

Bobbie understood most of what Avasarala had said, but who the fuck was Larson to be so familiar and make those dumb threats?

Cotyar ran a palm over his face before turning to Bobbie, his eyes telling her that her thoughts transparent. “She did something nice for the Larson years ago, off the record. Now Larson thinks of her as a role model,” he replied, shaking his head ruefully, before muttering with mild distaste, “Though this is obviously her coming to collect.”

“I can also hold grudges,” Avasarala warned.

“Wouldn’t be here if you didn’t,” Cotyar sing-songed with a deliberately fake smile.

Avasarala’s eyes widened for a split second before she came to stand before him, jaw tilted willfully and declaring, “You like working for me.”

“’Like’ is not the word I would use,” he said, bending his head over hers.

Avasarala smirked triumphantly. “That’s not what you said to me last--“

Red lights flickered and the deck beneath their feet dropped.

“Shit!”

Avasarala shot up in a free float and Bobbie instinctively pushed forward her, disengaging from the suction of the gravity boots with force. Cotyar’s arms swooped out and caught Avasarala, tucking her under his larger frame, protecting her from the innocuous bulkheads that could crack her head open under sudden gravity shifts, but leaving himself susceptible to that very same danger. Luckily, Bobbie’s quick reflexes and height enabled her reach up for them, and there was enough force from her initial push off to send the three of them back against a wall. The magnets of Bobbie’s boots clicked on, and she pulled them down into the safe and narrow space between her and the wall until she heard a similar click from Cotyar’s boots.

The lights stopped flashing, so even without the magnetic boots, it was safe for them to depend on the normalized thrust of the Roci once more. But the way Cotyar had his arms firmly around Avasarala kept her feet dangling between them. He didn’t seem inclined to let her go yet. She could feel the muscles of his forearm, tense and hard as a rock beneath the quick rise and fall of Avasarala’s chest. Bobbie decided she wasn’t so inclined either.

Avasarala panted between them, her hot breath landing somewhere over Bobbie’s left collarbone. From the corners of her eyes, Bobbie saw Avasarala setting her arms down. Cotyar’s very sudden and sharp inhale told her that Avasarala wasn’t simply resting her hands over his thighs.

The room constricted, until there was nothing and no one but the three of them, hearts racing from leftover adrenaline, minds jumbled by the closeness of each other, and bodies pressed together so tightly that they could feel the heat of each other through their clothes. It was that intimacy that allowed Bobbie to realize Avasarala was shaken, quaking in fear.

“Hey,” Bobbie whispered gently, “It’s okay.” She nuzzled at Avasarala’s temple, lips brushing over the top of her ear. “You’re okay.”

Avasarala gazed up at her with saucer like eyes. Bobbie smiled and nodded confidently. Slowly, Avasarala’s breath was no longer at the edge of hyperventilation. But that didn’t stop Bobbie from dropping her gaze to those softly parted lips. Even as Bobbie swallowed and licked her lips, her mouth seemed to have gone permanently dry just watching Avasarala breathe.

Avasarala’s shoulders drew down as if lending strength to her hands below. With action came an equal reaction. Cotyar flinched, his hips bucking, pushing one of Avasarala’s thighs up between hers. Bobbie gasped over the snap of relief and grip of frustration, but before she could roll back against that delicious pressure, a strong hand landed over her shoulder.

“Bobbie,” Cotyar called out between clenched teeth, “We need to go.” He punctuated the statement with the click of Avasarala’s boots on the deck, gazing hard at some vague point over her shoulder.

Bobbie growled with the knowledge that he was right. That sudden tilt of gravity felt more like the ship reacting automatically to a close quarter bogey than any of the gradual shifts or elegant turns she’d come to expect from Alex.

“Guys and gals, y’all better get up here cause that wasn’t me,” came the tight drawl of the pilot over the intercom.

At this very moment, she hated being right. Cotyar had an unwavering if slightly pained expression. Avasarala was blinking guilelessly at them. Unbelievable. She would like to hate them both if she could. So she did only thing she could think of and leaned back into the both of them, intending to give Cotyar a brief respite and Avasarala an eyeful of what she was missing.

Bobbie reached out, cupped Cotyar’s scruffy jaw over Avasarala’s head, and kissed him. She set her nails over the short prickly hairs and scratched lightly, the way he liked it. Her tongue licked over his, his mouth tasted faintly of coffee and the bad alcohol from before, and somehow that suited him, the stalwart spy and his non-payable debt. His lips were full and soft, made of flesh that could be bruised and split for himself, but now more for Avasarala. For all his bluster, Cotyar loved Avasarala more than life itself, even with the shadow of her son’s death between them. His heartbeat thumped beneath Bobbie’s palm and an ache settled unlike that of the rush of heat, but of the slow churn of longing and hurt. His, but now hers, and theirs.

When they broke apart for breath, it was a slow and gentle motion of reluctant parting. She sighed, running a hand over his cheek, realizing that she had came to care for the both of them, then now she was coming to care for the both of them together. Cotyar frowned at her, as if her actions were indecipherable. Avasarala herself held a hand almost protectively over his chest, eyeing her oddly.

That was all it took, apparently, to pull one over them. All she had to do was fall in love with them.


End file.
